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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28135719">i told you when i came, i was a stranger</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth'>ghost_teeth</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Mandalorian (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Forced Eye Contact, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Light Dom/sub, M/M, No Major Character Death, Substance Abuse, Touch-Starved, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, more like hurt/more hurt/then comfort, one instance of mildly dubious consent, takes place pre-chapter 13, the helmet comes off</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:01:25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>27,234</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28135719</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Mos Pelgo is gone. So is the Mandalorian.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Din Djarin/Cobb Vanth</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>191</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>449</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. high and wild</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>takes place between pre-chapter 13, timeline’s a little screwy. okay, so this is a bit of a dark one. there’ll be comfort, but not for a while. hurt people hurt people, etc.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The floor is singing, he thinks—a dirge, low and wheezing, the sort of sound that catches you by the sternum and slowly rattles you apart. Engine-hum, he realizes, and it’s the first remotely coherent thought he’s had in hours, days, years. </p><p>He feels like a sidi gourd that’s been scraped out for cooking, as if someone has pulped his soft wet insides with a fork and discarded them, leaving the hollow meat of him ready for the oven. He’s too cold, too hot, shivering violently. Spice-shakes, he thinks distantly, and though he doesn’t specifically remember partaking of anything other than liquor, it isn’t terribly surprising. Not out of the ordinary for him, lately. </p><p>His head is moving, and he isn’t the one moving it. Something has him by the chin, turning his face this way and that, and now there’s something at his mouth, and it’s gloriously wet—a cloth, he supposes, dabbing at the cracked ruin of his lips. His tongue slithers out to chase the moisture. The cloth stills and is withdrawn, and though he tries to protest, he can’t manage a sound. His throat’s been removed along with the rest of his insides, it seems. But then his head is being lifted and something else pressed to his lips, the rim of a container, maybe, and a voice is saying, “Drink.” The water is unpleasantly warm, but all the same, if there were spare moisture left in him, he’d weep for joy.</p><p>“Slow,” the voice is saying. “Easy.” It’s barely a whisper, a low rasping thing soft as a breeze over sand dunes. It might be familiar, might not. He’s gone looking for <em> familiar </em> everywhere, lately, so he can’t trust his own judgment.</p><p>Dragging his eyelids open is an eons-long, tectonic event. He’s aged decades by the time he manages to squint up at the owner of the voice, and even then, the world fizzes like a poorly-rendered holo. The man is dark haired and indistinct beyond that, features slipping in and out of focus. “Vanth,” he says, and leans closer. “You with me?” </p><p>The man’s hand is hot on Cobb’s chin, and Cobb wants to tell him <em> no, I’m not with you, not really, </em>but some crucial connection between his brain and his mouth seems to have been severed and the instructions are intercepted before they can be relayed. Instead, he vomits a sour stream of warm water over the strange man’s knuckles. </p><p>“Oh,” the man says, pulling his hand back. Cobb wants to laugh, but what little he can see of the world is going gray at the corners, and he’s drifting, gone.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Time beads like condensation on a glass at the edges of Cobb’s awareness, after that. </p><p>Sometimes he’s awake, alone in merciful darkness with that distant mechanical hum or attended by the quiet man who knows his name and offers none in return. The man brings water, helps him stand to use the vac tube once or twice, mops vomit from his chin, but says very little. </p><p>More often, Cobb’s asleep, or something closer to dead. When he sleeps, he dreams in brandy-amber and gold, beautiful filthy faces and pale buildings glowing at high noon, sand boiling like soup in a pot. </p><p>He thinks he speaks to the man once or twice during his rare lucid moments, and maybe the man replies in his low, scraping voice, but the memories of these conversations are slippery things, eeling through his fingers when he tries to examine them later.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>There are twin beetles overhead when he opens his eyes, glittering liquid-black and beautiful, and he wants to reach out and touch them but his arms are leaden and unresponsive at his sides. A second passes, and the beetles <em> blink. </em>Not beetles, Cobb realizes, but eyes, huge and luminous in a wrinkled little face. There’s a warm weight on his chest.</p><p>“Mrrrm,” says the green child seriously, and pats Cobb’s cheek with his little hand as if to emphasize some mysterious point. He’s utterly unchanged from the last time Cobb saw him.</p><p>“Hey there,” Cobb says helplessly, and his voice sounds more like a death-rattle. </p><p>The kid burbles a sweet string of nonsense syllables and smiles, perhaps pleased at being recognized. He barely weighs anything at all, but Cobb’s nerves are crawling, prickling hot with what he recognizes as the comedown from the sort of cheap spice that’s probably been synthesized from mining chaff and cut with hull de-icer. Even the kid’s meager weight on his chest, the touch of his soft little hands on Cobb’s jaw is too much, too much. He wants to shuck his skin off like a glove and roll around on the floor until it all stops.</p><p>Suddenly, the kid is hoisted up and away, squawking in protest as he’s tucked under an arm. “Not right now,” the dark-haired man murmurs to the kid, and hitches him higher up on his hip. He stoops to wave a chirping med scanner over Cobb like he’s seasoning a roast. “You awake for real this time?” The question is addressed more to the scanner than to Cobb.</p><p>“Mahh,” the kid answers on Cobb’s behalf.</p><p>Cobb licks his lips and opens his mouth, intending to ask for water, or for some kind of explanation of where the hell he even is, but what comes out instead is, “Why’s <em> he </em> with <em> you </em>?” His voice sounds distant to his own ears, as if he’s hearing it from another room.</p><p>The man’s eyes flicker to his face—caf-dark eyes, Cobb notices for the first time—then away just as quickly. He doesn’t answer, instead disappearing momentarily from Cobb’s field of view and returning with a canteen in one hand and no kid in the other. He sinks into a stiff crouch at Cobb’s side and proffers the canteen, giving it a perfunctory shake so the liquid inside sloshes invitingly. “Think you can sit up?” </p><p>It turns out that Cobb hasn’t actually lost movement in his arms; he’s just been aggressively swaddled in a rough gray blanket, arms pinioned to his sides. The stranger helps him peel back the blanket, and Cobb manages to prop himself up on one unsteady elbow to drink. </p><p>He’s absorbed his surroundings in spastic fragments during the time he’s spent in and out of consciousness (a day? Two? Hard to say), but the pieces coalesce into a whole now. A ship for sure, he thinks, though he’s spent his life ankle-deep in Tatooine sand and couldn’t tell a leisure yacht from the ass-end of a freighter if his dignity depended on it. He’s been trussed up in a blanket and deposited on the floor of a narrow hold corridor like a corpse in a winding-shroud awaiting burial, cushioned on a miserable-smelling pile of old tarps and cargo netting. He realizes with distaste that the hold is so cramped that his head’s practically been in the adjacent ‘fresher the entire time he’s been lying here.</p><p>The water is again sickeningly warm, with that nose-wrinkling iron tang that a cheap vaporator leaves, but Cobb still drains the canteen to the last drop. It’s a hell of a trick, though, trying to inhale a liter of water in one gulp while leveling an appropriately intimidating <em> don’t-kriffing-try-anything </em> stare at a man who avoids eye-contact like it’s his job.</p><p>Cobb separates his mouth from the canteen with an embarrassingly audible pop, and though the man reaches out to take the empty container, Cobb pulls it back, clutching it to his chest like a hostage. “The hell are you and why do you have that kid with you?” he demands again.</p><p>The man opens his mouth, then seems to think better of whatever he was about to say and shuts it again, sitting back on his heels. His eyes are never still, ticking from floor to canteen to Cobb’s left ear like he’s tracking some unseen insect’s flight path. Cobb has half a mind to ask what the man’s tripping on when he finally gets a reply: “I’m taking care of him. For now.” A curious spasm passes over the man’s face, something vivid but somehow unreadable, as if his features don’t quite know how to work together to produce a coherent expression.</p><p>The kid had waved to him the last time Cobb saw him, he remembers—three little fingers wiggling over the top of a bag just before a speeder whisked him away, along with one of the last men alive who might remember Marshal Cobb Vanth as he’d been <em> before </em> (back when he was certain, steady, anchored. Back when he’d been Marshal of anything at all). </p><p>There’s some sad story hanging thick in the air, here, and Cobb can almost see the shape of the answer before he asks his next question. He asks it anyway. “Where’s the Mandalorian?” </p><p>Dark eyes snap to Cobb’s face for one startling instant, brown gone nearly black beneath heavy brows, and then the man’s gaze is wandering away again, following the exposed formers and stringers of the fuselage upward toward nothing in particular. “Where’s Mos Pelgo?” the man asks the air above Cobb’s head. </p><p>“Gone,” Cobb whispers. Despite the water, he’s gone dry inside again, so dry and empty he can almost hear the wind howling between his ribs.</p><p>“Gone,” the man says also, and it’s not a disbelieving repetition, but its own sort of answer.</p><p>This time, when the man reaches out for the empty canteen, Cobb lets him take it, lets him disappear again into some other corner of the ship.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>(In the lonely hour that follows, the ship hums him to sleep, and it’s a red dream, a bad one, the kind he usually drowns in liquor. It’s the one where the suns overhead are swollen and bloody, staining the sands the color of a spreading infection. He’s wandering that new depression in the ground, sand still all raw and roiled like a tooth gone missing, and there are hats scattered over the ground, neat and upright, inviting—practical hats, the sort with sun-bills and flaps to keep the sand out of your ears. He knows not to pick them up or move them. He knows what’s underneath each of those hats, what he might see sticking up out of the sand if he looks.)</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>There are clean clothes waiting for Cobb when he wakes, folded into military rectangles at his feet. They’re colorless and stiff, somehow too short, too long, too tight, and too wide all at once, but it’s a relief to shed his ripe old clothes all the same. His boots are mysteriously AWOL and there’s no replacement at hand, so he shuffles on socked feet to the nearby ladder and hauls himself up. He’s not sure where he’s going, but <em> up </em> seems as productive a direction as any, even if his entire body howls in protest at the exertion.</p><p>The interior of the cockpit and its inhabitants barely register in Cobb’s mind for the first moment, as his eyes are drawn directly to the viewports, where an endless hazy expanse of space swirls. He’s never been off-planet. Space looks like the backs of his eyelids when he blinks against sunlight, he thinks, and nothing more. It doesn’t inspire poetry in him the way he always sort of thought it might.</p><p>“You won’t get any ransom for me, if this is a kidnapping,” he says to what he can see of the top of the man’s head over the pilot’s chair. </p><p>“Wasn’t counting on it,” the man says dryly, but doesn’t turn around. </p><p>In one of the two passenger seats, there’s a pile of blankets, at the center of which sits the child. His enormous ears and eyes are angled in Cobb’s direction, but he’s silent in a way that strikes Cobb as thoughtful, even sympathetic. Cobb tosses the kid a little two-fingered wave as he sinks into the empty seat. He’s shaky down to the very marrow of his bones, cold in a way that nothing short of boiling himself alive might remedy. “Where are we?” he asks, tucking his trembling hands beneath his ass in hopes of warming them up. </p><p>“Not far from Tatooine. Sublight.” </p><p>Cobb nods as if that means anything to him, and tries to arrange the questions teeming behind his teeth into some kind of orderly queue. “How’d you find me?” is the next one that makes it out of his mouth.</p><p>The man toggles a series of switches, though as far as Cobb can tell it doesn’t produce any drastic effect on their course or speed. “Wasn’t looking for you,” he says finally, head turning just slightly. “Just stopped over in Bestine for a refuel, thought we might lie low for a while outside the city, somewhere out of the way. <em> You </em> found <em> us </em>.”</p><p>“I—what?” Cobb frowns at the back of the pilot’s chair headrest, tries to comb through the tatters of his recent memory. He dimly recalls the night he lit out for Bestine, thumbing a ride to anywhere on an ill-traveled trade road, but little beyond that. There are bits and pieces, sure—the sidecar of a speeder, the burn of booze in his throat, unfamiliar company in quiet corners, pissing in alleys—but nothing coherent, nothing involving this man or that child. </p><p>“Outside an inn, middle of the afternoon,” the man elaborates. “I think you were trying to fight me. Not sure why. You, ah… fell over. I picked you up.”</p><p>“And, what, you decided the best way for me to sober up was a few bracing days in space?” Cobb snorts.</p><p>The man half-swivels his chair around, catching Cobb’s eyes for the barest second before bending to attend to some inscrutable blinking light on the control panel. “Not at first,” he says. “I asked if I should fly you home. Guess you don’t remember that.”</p><p>He’s right; Cobb doesn’t remember. But Cobb has some idea as to what his answer would have been. </p><p>The man darts one last glance at Cobb before turning back to the front viewscreen, quick and quiet and guilty as a kid caught doing something he shouldn’t. He’s not a small man by any stretch, but something about the way his broad shoulders are hunched makes him seem narrower, almost swallowed by the pilot’s chair. </p><p>“It’s <em> you </em>, though, isn’t it, Mandalorian?” Cobb finds himself saying to the headrest, and though he’s practically whispering, the question splits the air in the cockpit like blaster fire. The man doesn’t visibly flinch, but something about the way the lines of him go taut suggests that he wants to. He doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t turn around.</p><p>A strange sour spike of irritation rises in Cobb’s throat. He’s monumentally hungover, freezing, sweating, shaking, reeking of old booze and vomit and worse—he’s already sunk as low as he can get; the least this man can do is come down from on high to visit with him in the pit he’s made of his life. Riding his sudden surge of petulant anger, Cobb kicks one leg out, hooks his ankle through the armrest of the pilot’s chair and pulls. He’s mildly surprised when the only resistance he meets is the man’s knee knocking hard against the console as the chair is yanked around. </p><p>Cobb plants his foot on the seat of the chair in the space between the man’s legs to keep him from turning back around. “Come on now, <em> partner </em>,” he prods, tipping half-sideways in an effort to catch the man’s gaze as it slides away. “It’s you, I can tell.” </p><p>And the funny thing is, he really <em> can </em> tell, now that he’s mostly in possession of his faculties. There’s something about the tilt of the man’s head, the cut of his shoulders, the breadth of his hands—different without the armor, yes, but too-vivid still in Cobb’s memory. Even more familiar is the weary sigh the man heaves after a moment of their silent standoff.</p><p>“Thought real Mandalorians don’t take their helmets off in front of anybody,” Cobb says. </p><p>“They don’t,” says the Mandalorian. He has a man’s face, hawk-nosed and roughly carved, but it moves like a child’s, sweet and simple and utterly guileless in its naked pain. </p><p>So Cobb isn’t the only one up to his knees in the rubble of his own life, he thinks, and he’s distantly horrified when the realization sends a dark thrill of satisfaction down his spine. There’s an unspoken tragedy at play here, some sequel to a story he never read. If he were a better man, he would be able to find something kind to say instead of twisting the knife further. </p><p>“So what’s that make you, then?” he asks, too innocently.</p><p>The man who isn’t a Mandalorian looks down at Cobb’s foot where it sits on the chair between his legs, anchoring him inescapably to this conversation. “Din,” he says to Cobb’s sock. The word sounds strange and stiff coming from his mouth, as if he’s been asked to read something aloud in a language he doesn’t speak. “Just Din. If you have to call me anything at all.”</p><p>A nasal little grunt punctures the moment, and Cobb’s not certain when the kid clambered up the side of his chair, but now he’s scaling Cobb’s thigh like a determined lizard. Cobb and the not-Mandalorian watch in bewildered silence as the kid uses Cobb’s leg as a bridge to the pilot’s chair, tiny features scrunched in concentration as he wobbles precariously across Cobb’s shin. The not-Mandalorian—<em> Din </em>—reaches out to scoop the kid up just before he overbalances and topples to the floor, and pulls him close, tucking him with practiced ease into the crook of an elbow. </p><p>“‘Fresher’s below,” Din says suddenly, tossing a jerky little nod in the direction of the ladder. “If you want to use the sonic.” More than an invitation, it’s a plea—for space, maybe, for Cobb to release him from this conversation. Or maybe it’s just a desperate appeal for Cobb to stop fouling the air in the cockpit with the stink of a week-long bender.</p><p>From his place in Din’s arms, the kid is staring holes through Cobb’s face with his enormous eyes. It’s more than the strangely calculating look he’s received on more than one occasion from infants; this is inescapable, terrifyingly thorough. The kid seems to be looking through Cobb’s flesh, through his bones to all the softest and sickest parts of him, and Cobb feels unaccountably like something pale and under-evolved turned up from under a stone. </p><p>And then the kid’s smiling again, soft and sweet and without intent, tiny hands petting at Din’s sleeve, seeking out stray threads to wind around his claws.</p><p>Cobb’s up and out of his chair before he realizes it, near tripping over his own ankles in his carefully casual retreat toward the ladder. “Much obliged, think I’ll do that,” he drawls, aiming for debonair but probably landing somewhere closer to loopy. “Thanks for your hospitality.”</p><p>As he turns to descend the ladder, he catches one last glimpse of Din, still in his chair, carefully moving his knees closer together as if worried someone else might come by and try to put their foot there to pin him to another uncomfortable conversation.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>There’s a small shaving mirror in the ‘fresher, barely large enough to see one’s entire face in. This, of all things, strikes Cobb as remarkable. He’d never have thought of the Mandalorian (Din, he reminds himself again) as a man particularly inclined to look at himself for some reason. Then again, he reflects, in his experience, maintaining a mustache by feel alone generally produces tragic results.</p><p>And isn’t that something. The Mandalorian has a mustache. He has dark eyes. He has a name. Cobb shouldn’t know these things, but the galaxy is a funny old place. If gallows humor is your thing.</p><p>The sonic shower hums the grime from the skeleton Cobb’s made of his body, and he studiously avoids his own reflection’s gaze. He’s glad the mirror is as small as it is. If this tiny square of his face is anything to go by, seeing any more of himself might be the thing that finally unravels what’s left of him.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“Kicker is, it was the dragon that got us in the end after all.”</p><p>The gluey ration bar is doing its level best to cement Cobb’s jaws together, but he manages to talk around the mouthful anyway. He’s not hungry, but Din had insisted, and besides that shredding the wrapper gives him something to do with his hands. They’re in the cargo hold again, the three of them, Cobb leaning on the ladder, Din tucking the kid into a tiny hammock jury-rigged from a tarp strung along the bulkhead. Din’s head tips in Cobb’s direction, indicating without turning around that he’s listening. In the brief time Cobb had known him before, he’d always managed a peculiar sort of expressiveness with the helmet on by angling his head just so. Without it, he gives the impression of an overgrown scurrier cocking an ear to the wind to listen for predators. </p><p>Cobb washes the ration bar down with a gulp of tepid water and continues, matter-of-factly: “Not the dragon itself, obviously, you put paid to that pretty handily. Nope, turns out when something that big makes a habit of tunneling beneath a town on the regular, it leaves the ground all soft and full of holes.” He forces himself to take another bite, and adds, “Like cheese.”</p><p>Din finishes fussing with the kid’s blankets and sinks to the floor where he’s arranged a sad little nest of soft cargo-hold flotsam for himself, the same as Cobb’s makeshift sick-bed. Strange, Cobb thinks—has he always slept on the floor like an unanticipated guest on his own ship? Seems a ship like this ought to have some kind of sleeping berth tucked away somewhere. There’s obvious discomfort in the way Din leans against the bulkhead and arranges his limbs into awkward knots. Once he’s settled, he looks over at Cobb—really, properly <em> looks </em> at him, even if just for a moment—and there’s something about the way his brow wrinkles and the corners of his mouth twitch down that makes Cobb want to cram himself down the vac tube. </p><p>“A sinkhole,” Din says softly.</p><p>“Big enough to swallow up a town, yeah.” Cobb feels his mouth pulling into a sick smile. He can’t make it stop. His face feels as if it’s splitting to the ears. “And I do mean swallow it up. Deep enough that you couldn’t even see the roofs anymore. Too deep to measure. And the sand just kind of… rushed back in. Like it was just waiting to do that the whole time. Like the town had just been in the way.”  </p><p>“Survivors?” </p><p>Cobb snorts. “Sure, whoever was with me at the time, or out of town. Suppose others might’ve made it out and scattered. Hard to say.” He hears the follow-up question before Din even has a chance to ask it, and heads it off at the pass. “I... wasn’t there.” </p><p>It feels like confessing to a crime. Maybe he is. He could go down on his knees here and now, tell this man who isn’t quite a stranger everything, maybe find absolution in it (better yet, retribution).</p><p>“I did fly over,” Din says. “After we picked you up. You were sort of hard to understand at the time. Thought I’d go see for myself.” </p><p>Cobb’s smile is starting to hurt his face. He suspects he looks completely deranged. “Not much to see even from the air, I expect.”</p><p>“No,” Din agrees quietly. “Not much.”</p><p>It’s getting hard to look at Din’s face, the pity evident in the angle of his brows. “Don’t suppose you’d like to have a drink with me?” Cobb asks around a nauseous little laugh. “That is, assuming you’ve got any booze in this tub at all. Seems things’ve gone down the tubes for both of us lately, correct me if I’m wrong.” He waves a hand at his own face, pointedly, and jerks his chin in Din’s direction. </p><p>Din is quiet for a long moment. He’s looked away again, Cobb notices with some measure of relief. “I don’t think that’s a good idea for either of us,” he says finally.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Sleeping on a ship is an impossible endeavor if you’re not used to it, Cobb discovers. Nothing is ever quite dark, or quite quiet. He’s accustomed to the soft dry dark of Tatooine nights, stained faintly rust-red by the reflection of three moons off sand dunes. It’s cold on the ship, always cold, and it isn’t just the lingering spice-shakes rattling Cobb’s ribs. He slips in and out of a shivery doze, too aware of the mysterious constellations of blinking indicator lights leering at him like eyes. </p><p>He wonders if it’s night on Tatooine. He supposes it doesn’t matter. </p><p>It’s his bladder that eventually drives him out of bed. He disentangles himself from his blankets and, after availing himself of the facilities, opts to ascend the ladder to the cockpit instead of trying to get comfortable on the floor again. He glances over his shoulder as he climbs and catches a glimpse of the tousled crown of Din’s head, just visible over the mess of detritus he’s burrowed under to sleep at the far end of the cargo hold. His hair is curly, uneven. Cobb still isn’t sure what to do with this information.</p><p>The cockpit feels somehow smaller without its pilot, the ship now just a cowering frightened thing crouched beneath the weight of all that space lurking just outside. Cobb slides into the empty pilot’s seat and stares determinedly through the transparisteel of the front viewport, as if by refusing to blink first he’ll somehow bring all of space to heel. He feels small but heavy, too dense for his own frame. His blood is toxic-cold in his veins and it burns. His skin belongs to someone else and he’s just borrowing it without permission.</p><p>He wonders idly if there’s button on the console that could launch him directly out a fucking airlock. </p><p>“Vanth.” The voice is quiet. Always quiet, like a man trying hard not to wake someone up.</p><p>Cobb swivels around so violently he almost does a complete 360. He stops himself and stares crazily at Din, who has materialized without fanfare in one of the passenger seats. “That’s me,” he says hoarsely.</p><p>Din’s eyes traverse his face like he’s trying to read something small and far away. “What are you doing?” he asks Cobb’s chin. </p><p>“Oh, just, you know. Looking at all the pretty lights, wondering what they do,” Cobb says, flapping an unsteady arm at the blinking indicators on the console. </p><p>“You should try to get some more sleep.” Din doesn’t sound as if he has much hope that Cobb will do as he says. “Or eat something.”</p><p>A low, humorless chuckle hisses out through Cobb’s teeth. “Probably should,” he agrees, intending to do no such thing. He scrubs his fingertips through his beard, grimacing at the shabby overgrowth of it. His hair still feels greasy despite the sonic’s best efforts. It’s a wonder Din recognized him at all in Bestine. A thought strikes him suddenly. “Where are my boots, by the way?”</p><p>“You didn’t have any when we found you.” Din shrugs apologetically.</p><p>Cobb frowns down at his own feet. “Oh,” he says. “And how long’s it been since you picked me up?” </p><p>Din leans sideways to peer around him, squinting at some reading on the console. “About two standard days,” he replies. “Bit less by Tatooine reckoning.”</p><p>“Two days, huh.” Cobb isn’t sure if it’s more or less time than he thought. “Two days.” He tries to calculate the date based on this information, but realizes that he doesn’t even know what day it was before he started drinking. Time doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore, he supposes. </p><p>“You were in rough shape,” Din says, sounding strangely defensive.</p><p>“Yeah, well.” Cobb leans forward in his seat, elbows on his knees. It might be his imagination, but it seems that Din draws back in response, just by a hair’s breadth. “All better now, right? Thanks for your assistance. Appreciate it if you’d just drop me back planetside again at your earliest convenience.”</p><p>Din cocks his head. “Drop you where, exactly? Back where I found you?” His voice is soft as ever, but there’s something with claws lurking just below, something Cobb’s certain is meant to be cutting. </p><p>“Sure, that’s fine,” Cobb says airily, and he feels his face split into that horrible grin again. “Or Anchorhead. Or Mos Espa. Or the kriffing middle of the Jundland Wastes. Whatever’s convenient.”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>Cobb feels his grin turn feral, lips skinning back from his teeth in something closer to a snarl. “No?” he repeats sweetly. “What do you mean, <em> no </em>? Just gonna keep me here? For what, exactly? My sparkling company? A nanny for the kid?”</p><p>“No,” Din says again, steadily. “Not yet. I’m not going to let you go back to what you were doing and waste all my hard work.”</p><p>“All your hard work,” Cobb snorts. “Right, of course.”</p><p>“I think you should go back to bed,” Din says. There’s steel in his voice, though his eyes are soft. Always soft, Cobb thinks, dark and wounded and forgiving like livestock awaiting slaughter. The cold commanding surety of the helmet’s visor was better. Cobb thinks he might like to cradle this man’s bare face in his hands and gently put his thumbs through those eyes. </p><p>Instead, he unfolds himself from the pilot’s seat and stands, stretching languidly. “Alright then, <em> partner, </em>” he says. “Whatever you say, of course. Whatever you say.”</p><p>The unmistakable full-body flinch it elicits when he pointedly knocks against Din’s shoulder on his way back to the ladder is worth the price of admission.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It might be daytime somewhere, on some planet. It doesn’t matter. In the idle hours, they drift around one another like planets in a decaying orbit, never really exchanging more than a sentence or two, but never far from one another. Cobb suspects he’s being watched and monitored, as if he’s got a secret supply of hooch stuffed up a body cavity somewhere. </p><p>He complains of the cold offhand, and Din supplies him with additional layers. Din himself is cocooned in what appears to be multiple shirts and at least two outer layers, as well as gloves and a scarf, all shapeless and colorless, terribly crumpled as if they’ve been stored carelessly for years. Cobb suspects this choice in attire has less to do with the chill of the ship and more to do with a need for a substantial barrier between skin and open air.</p><p>The kid seems fascinated with Cobb, always tugging at his sleeve for attention or stretching out his arms to be picked up. Despite it all, Cobb can’t find it in himself to be resentful or cold. The kid likes to touch his beard, and he lets him. The touch is gentle, less exploratory and more for comfort, although it’s unclear if it’s for the kid’s or his own. </p><p>“I was with your Tuskens when it happened, you know,” Cobb says casually over dinner as he passes the kid the better share of his boxed rations. They’re calling it dinner, anyway, as it’s the third time Din’s tried to feed him during the time they’ve been awake.</p><p>Din, scrunched against the bulkhead in his makeshift bed as he eats, watches every movement of Cobb’s hand as it passes food to the kid. He doesn’t look up, but Cobb knows he’s listening.</p><p>“Yeah, just a trade meet-up,” Cobb continues. “Maybe ten of us. Went well enough, I suppose. ‘Til we got home, anyway. And saw.”</p><p>The Tuskens had been silent as they worked alongside the bitterly weeping remnants of Mos Pelgo’s population, sifting through the sand with spades for any signs of life, finding nothing. They’d stayed silent as the sole survivors roared away on their speeders for destinations unknown, silhouetted against the setting suns like monuments to the dead. </p><p>“They were good as their word, you’ll be glad to know.” Cobb manages a bite of dehydrated meat, chews, swallows. It tastes of nothing but salt. “Never broke peace with us, all the way to the end. Can’t ask for more’n that, I guess.”</p><p>Din is examining him now from across the hold, head to toe, as if there might be more to the story written somewhere on Cobb’s body. “I’m sorry,” he says. </p><p>Cobb’s pretty sure he means it, deeply and honestly. He doesn’t care. “Yeah, that’s gotta chap <em> your </em> hide, huh, Mandalorian?” he laughs, lip drawing up in a sneer. He wants to vomit the bite of meat back up immediately. “You put in all that effort to save some little podunk town, nearly get yourself eaten by a dragon and blown up to hell, and it’s gone anyway not four months later. How’s that for job satisfaction, huh? Ain’t that a son of a bitch. So much for playing hero.” He wonders what he might be able to say to make Din hit him. He hopes he’s close.</p><p>“I’m not sorry for <em> me. </em>” Din doesn’t seem to be taking the bait, but he appears to have shrunk back against the bulkhead as if struck. “It’s just. A terrible thing. To lose everyone you know. I’m… sorry.”</p><p>“Yeah? You sitting on some big tragic past that you wanna share with the class, too?” Cobb shoots back. He wishes he could stop talking, stop spitting venom, but someone else is at the controls now, some snarling trapped thing that wants to sink its teeth into something soft and vulnerable and shake it to pieces. Din doesn’t answer, and Cobb’s traitorous mouth takes over again: “What happened to your helmet, anyway? How come you’re walking around looking like the town beggar these days? You still a Mandalorian, or what?”</p><p>There’s no air left in the cabin. Din stands slowly, empty ration container in hand. He walks carefully over to Cobb and the kid, stoops to collect their empty container as well and scoops the kid up in his other hand. His face is utterly empty as he deposits the containers in the incinerator and returns to his space to tuck the kid into his hammock. The kid’s eyes are on Cobb over Din’s shoulder the entire time, endlessly deep black and sweet enough that Cobb might choke.</p><p>Din retreats up the ladder to the cockpit once the kid is comfortable, but his gloved fingers brush Cobb’s trembling shoulder as he goes, soft as a breath. Cobb wishes with every molecule of himself that Din would just hit him instead.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Turns out Cobb was right about there being a berthing compartment hidden somewhere in the hold. He’s idling in the near-dark of the pretend night, alone and wide awake, and his fingers wander the wall curiously. There’s a switch, and he flips it.</p><p>A panel opens with a sigh, and for one wild moment Cobb thinks he’s looking at the Mandalorian’s severed head. But no, it’s just the helmet, sitting empty on a little bunk wedged into the compartment. The cuirass, vambraces, and pauldrons are arrayed behind it, glowing soft silver in the low light. They’ve been laid out with care, cleaned and oiled and interred like a body in a mausoleum. And that’s what it is, isn’t it, Cobb thinks. The bunk has become a burial-place for the Mandalorian, a closet to store a skeleton in. </p><p>He flips the switch and the panel closes again. He doesn’t worry about making too much noise—he knows Din is awake, even if he’s still motionless in his bedding. </p><p>Soft on stockinged feet, he paces across the hold and stands over Din’s huddled form. Din is facing away, curled on his side, but no sleeping man breathes that quickly. Cobb kneels, arms’-length away. </p><p>“I’m cold,” he whispers, and crawls beneath the bedding.</p><p>He fits his kneecaps into the spaces at the backs of Din’s knees, his hipbones against the curve of Din’s ass, his chin into the nape of Din’s neck. He wraps an an arm around Din’s abdomen, hand rubbing soft circles into the very middle of him. It isn’t meant to soothe. It’s just one more cruelty, one more way of biting the hand that’s fed him. </p><p>Din doesn’t move, doesn’t speak to either object or invite. He just lays there, stiff and silent, and the panicked stutter of his breath against Cobb’s ribs is sick dark music. He starts to tremble, and Cobb holds him closer, makes himself inescapable.</p>
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<a name="section0002"><h2>2. this or any other matter</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>whoops, this got too long, so it's gonna be 3 chapters instead of 2. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i swear the comfort part of this alleged hurt/comfort disaster is coming next chapter, in spades.</p><p>content advisory for unclear consent in this chapter</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The ship is old, Cobb learns, reasonably well-maintained but temperamental and prone to little tantrums like most old things. This time, it’s the overhead lighting that’s shorted out for no apparent reason, leaving them with nothing but the drowsy amber glow of the emergency backup lights, indicators and monitors winking like stars in the gloom. </p><p>A panel in the grating of the cargo hold floor has been prised up, and Din is on his knees, shoulders-deep in the guts of the ship and mumbling quiet curses to himself around the flashlight clenched between his teeth. </p><p>Cobb, perched atop a crate, bounces the child absently on his knee and considers the arch of Din’s spine. </p><p>He’d dragged the crate over from the corner and installed himself far closer to Din’s workspace than necessary, lingering in the very corner of Din’s peripheral vision like a sleep-paralytic haunting. Even beneath layers and layers of shapeless insulating clothing, and despite his apparent engagement in the task at hand, the lines of Din’s back are tripwire-tight. He knows he’s being watched, knows that Cobb wants him to know it. This is the game they’re playing now—quiet brinkmanship, the sort of polite war of attrition in which the first one to acknowledge the conflict loses. </p><p>“I can’t decide if I pictured you older or younger,” Cobb says, wickedly casual. </p><p>Din hunches over further, as if he might try to burrow completely into the ship’s inner workings and hibernate until Cobb passes by like an unfavorable season. </p><p>Pleased, Cobb continues: “Definitely not what I pictured, all the same. Guess I don’t know <em> what </em> I was imagining, exactly. Someone hard, maybe. Stone-cold military. Probably bald. Kinda guy who looks like he was born fifty, you know? Or hell, maybe I didn’t picture anything under there at all. Just more armor, suits of armor all the way down like a nesting doll.” None of this is true—this is not at all what his mind had filled that armor with, before—but glibness suits this particular sortie better, gives the joke more bite.</p><p>“Mm. Guess that would’ve been better,” Din says blandly, taking the flashlight out of his mouth to peer at something deeper beneath the floor. “Suits of armor all the way down. No real loss if something happens to one of them.”</p><p>This is the kind of sly little skirmish Cobb has come to like best in the time he’s spent aboard this ship. Din is, in all things, a quiet man, and it’s difficult to really sink your teeth into a quiet man. But sometimes he breaks cover and makes some small effort to return fire, and that’s when Cobb has a chance to deal real damage. </p><p>“But you aren’t, are you? All armor, that is. Obviously,” Cobb says, petting the child’s head with careful fingers even as something dark and delighted twists through his insides. “Or a hard man. No, seeing you now, like this—kinda makes me think of when a dune beetle gets flipped over and can’t right itself. They can die like that, y’know? You’ll find ‘em sometimes like that: shell gets stuck in the sand, their soft bits just bake in the sun.”</p><p>“I look like a bug?” Din snorts into the ship’ innards. “Thanks, I guess.” His tone is dry, almost nonchalant, but his shoulders are creeping steadily toward his ears. </p><p>Cobb’s plucked the right chord, he knows. He wonders if Din can see how he’s smiling out of the corner of his eye, if it would make him shiver like Cobb now knows he does when he’s in danger of being perceived as a flesh-and-blood creature. </p><p>“No, no, not like a bug at all,” Cobb says sweetly. “I just mean that under all that, when somehow something manages to roll you over, you’re really sorta soft, aren’t you? I mean, yeah, you could crumple me up easy as a napkin and toss me in the incinerator with or without the armor, obviously. That’s not what I’m talking about.” He leans forward as best he can without squishing the kid in his lap. “What I mean is, you been vacuum-packed in that helmet so long, you never had to develop a rind like the rest of us. You’ve stayed all raw and fresh and new under it. That kind of soft.”</p><p>It’s clear that Din isn’t seeing the wires in front of his face anymore. He’s bent near-double with his hands on his knees, fingers curling slowly into fists. “Careful, Vanth,” he says quietly. It’s probably meant to be a threat. To Cobb, it sounds like a plea for mercy. He has none left to offer.</p><p>“Yeah, peel you out of your shell, you’re all kinds of exposed. All tender and confused, like something newborn and wobbly,” Cobb says indulgently. There are three blunt claws on his wrist, patting him for attention. He hooks the little fingers gently around his thumb, but his eyes are savage on the back of Din’s neck. “Being shoved out into the open like this makes you jumpy, I think. No, not jumpy—<em> shy. </em>I guess that’s what’s throwing me. Wouldn’t have thought it. Just thought you were sort of taciturn and and whatnot, and maybe that’s what you are with the helmet, but without it, you’re just so shy. Soft and shy. Add the big ol’ cow-eyes on top of that and, well.”</p><p>The last observation is barely out of his mouth when Din shoots to his feet, and he stands tall and dark and terribly still against the dim backup lighting, hydrospanner poised at hip-height like a blaster. “If you’re done talking,” he says, soft as the first whispers of an earthquake, “I’m going to go feed the kid now.”</p><p>He holds his free hand out for the child, but Cobb settles his arms more firmly around the little body, cuddling the kid closer. “We can take care of it ourselves, right, kiddo?” he croons into one of the child’s huge ears, but the saccharine, mildly deranged smile stinging his cracked lips is all for Din. “I know your daddy thinks otherwise, but I bet between the two of us, we’re capable of rustling up something nice to rehydrate. Bet we can manage that much, at least.” </p><p>And ain’t that something—after all that, it’s this, this little passive-aggressive potshot that has Din falling back a step, extended hand curling back against his own chest protectively as if Cobb’s just bitten him. “I didn’t—” he starts to say, eyebrows coming together in that damnable hangdog way they do, but Cobb’s already up and brushing past him on his way to the ship’s stores.</p><p>In his arms, the kid emits a sound like a tiny pneumatic drill jamming and paws at Cobb’s fingers. Guilt gnaws at the already ragged edges of Cobb’s nerves, and he immediately loosens his grip a bit. “Sorry, too tight, sorry,” he whispers, and brushes his mustache apologetically over the wrinkled little head, hoping he’s well out of Din’s earshot.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>The lights are still out, have been for hours and hours, and Cobb is waiting in Din’s bed. </p><p>Din knows he’s there, what he’s there for; it’s perfectly evident in the way Din refuses to look up from his ongoing efforts to repair the shorted fuse. He’s still bent over the open panel like a field surgeon of questionable talent, but he’ll come to bed soon. Cobb knows it. </p><p>The kid’s been tucked in, and his quiet open-mouthed baby snores are barely audible above the ever-present hum of the ship. Cobb had wanted to tell him a story, some sweet little hometown tale to help the kid get to sleep, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember anything worth telling. Anyway, he’s not even sure how much Basic the kid understands, so it might’ve been a moot point anyway. Instead, he just rested his hand on the soft swell of the kid’s round tummy and rocked him, knowing without looking that, despite the darkness, Din was watching, always watching.</p><p>Now, Cobb neatly turns down a corner of the shabby bedding next to him in silent invitation (command), reclines against the bulkhead and tries to think of a pretty tale for later. He remembers a favorite aunt, or maybe she’d just been a family friend, many generations a slave like his mother and himself. She often watched him while his mother labored in the fields and in worse places. Though she didn’t tell him stories, she sang sweetly and often. Her songs never had words, but they were lovely all the same. </p><p>(You need a tongue to sing songs with words. Cobb never asked what happened to hers.)</p><p>Cobb thinks over his own stories, if there might be anything suitable for a bedtime tale. He suspects he has none left to him now that end neatly enough. </p><p>Once, he might’ve told the kid about the night Jo came back abruptly from a trip to Mos Espa with a plump yellow-haired girl with a branded face in tow and declared to any who would listen that the girl was called Triss and she was having a baby and Jo would be its father, since it needed one. As the months passed, Triss grew rounder, and her sad scarred face grew sweeter and pinker whenever Jo laced their fingers together in public. The baby was called Pol, and Jo, young but true to her word, was as good a father as any child could ask for. </p><p>Or he might’ve told the one about Issa-Or and the first and last time she’d ever tried to ride an eopie. She hadn’t wanted to, but it’d been the only transport available to her for the trip home from Mos Eisley after the tragic death of her speeder at the hands of a sharp canyon switchback. Cobb, trying very hard not to laugh, had let her boost herself up onto the animal’s back using his clasped hands as a step, and the eopie, upon feeling the unfamiliar brush of her lekku on its sensitive neck, had promptly tossed her into the awning of an adjacent fruit stand. </p><p>There’s also the one about the dragon, about the off-world stranger who came to town in shining armor with a child in his arms and fought like fire-and-gasoline at Cobb’s side and then rode triumphant into the sunset like any good dragon-slayer.</p><p>Before, these were good stories, the kind you might take like medicine with a shot of spotchka to warm you on a chilly desert night. Now they’re sad-old-man stories, the kind with an unpretty end lurking unspoken around the corner.</p><p>Across the darkened hold, Din is now standing amid the crumpled ruin of Cobb’s bed, arms held stiffly at his sides as he looks at his own bed from afar. His face is barely visible through the gloom, but there’s an unsteadiness clear in his limbs even in the dark that screams uncertainty. Cobb pats the empty space next to him, and, jerkily, as if being drawn forward by invisible strings, Din comes.</p><p>Cobb, smiling like sunslight on an overturned beetle’s belly, reaches up to guide Din down as he approaches, taking hold of a forearm that twitches even through layers and layers of sleeves and pulling him to the floor. Din doesn’t quite go down without a fight, but it’s a formality more than anything at this point. Defeated, he crumples, lets Cobb lay him out on his side and tuck him in like a child, submits to the press of Cobb’s cold body (still cold, always cold) at his back, doesn’t protest as Cobb tangles their legs together to steal all the warmth he can. </p><p>Cobb’s arm is trapped beneath Din’s shoulder, and it’s probably equally uncomfortable for both of them. It doesn’t matter. Neither of them sleeps much, anyway.</p><p>There was a dream, once, not a week after the Mandalorian departed Mos Pelgo, the sort of dream you mostly construct yourself in that morning-space between sleeping and not. </p><p>In the dream, everything was soft, and the Mandalorian was wounded beautifully, cracks spidering across his breastplate like a hardboiled egg about to be peeled. Cobb was tender, and his fingers were younger than he remembered himself being as they followed the cracks and gently lifted the silvery fragments away piece by piece. It was allowed, it was a gift, and it was only for him.</p><p>Beneath the armor, there were stars he didn’t have names for, and there was a soft place for Cobb to sink his young hands into, enough room for him to crawl inside and curl up and rest. The Mandalorian replaced the pieces of his armor and kept him safe, and Cobb wasn’t alone in there, and there were hands that touched him like he might be something precious, a tongue that tasted every secret he still had and found nothing sour in it. </p><p>He remembers being half-awake and hard in his bed, jerking himself sleepily and coming over his own fist and feeling sticky and forgiven and new, and only a little foolish. </p><p>And that was it. Something about that private morning got the Mandalorian and his silver face and his big hands out of Cobb’s system, and life went on. He worked and he sweated and he watched over his people, and in time he forgot the exact curvature of the helmet, the precise words they’d said to each other on parting, and he didn’t even notice the forgetting. Infatuation is like that, he figured. Intense and unremarkable in equal measure. </p><p>Now that the sand has swallowed back up everything it’d ever given him, this is one final insult, this strange man he’s clinging to on the floor of a half-broken ship. </p><p>There’s no room inside this man who wears no armor for Cobb to hide away and sleep until he’s healed and whole, no mystery to the stars outside the ship. Beneath his hands and against his chest, Din is trembling again, but distantly, as if his bones are rattling inside him but he refuses to let it show. This man is not a hiding-place, Cobb thinks, but an animal in need of one. </p><p>Angrily, Cobb’s free hand drifts, petting Din’s ribcage through his clothes, feeling the tremors in his architecture. Serves the man right for being human, he thinks viciously, for being a fallible thing with a rabbiting pulse and heaving lungs.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“Don’t suppose <em> you </em> know what any of these do, do you?” </p><p>It’s still dark aboard the ship, but it’s morning, according to the ration bars each of them consumed and called breakfast. Somewhere below, Din is taking a break in his efforts to fix the lights to shower, and above, Cobb and the kid are examining the ship’s controls with interest.</p><p>“Guess we could just start pushing buttons and pulling levers,” Cobb mumbles against the crown of the kid’s downy head. “We really could. It’d take him a while to get up here and stop us, probably.”</p><p>“Mmrph,” says the kid, turning wide inkdrop eyes up from his place in Cobb’s arms. There’s something grave in his face, as if they’re crewmates conferring in earnest about their next move. After a moment, he adds, thoughtfully, “Bahhb.”</p><p>Cobb hums, eyes skating over the cool face of the console. “Yeah, no kidding,” he says. “This is a far toss from a speeder. Always sort of thought it might be even the least little bit similar, but guess not. Wonder if maybe I could push enough buttons to just confuse the everloving hell out of this old bucket. What do you think? Think I’d ruin it?”</p><p>The kid just tips his head, ears going all crooked and inquisitive, and Cobb’s mouth keeps going of its own accord. “Yeah,” he says, “I think I’d probably manage to do something like that if I ever I tried to fly something like this. Jettison something too important to lose, maybe, or send us into some kind of spin we can’t come back from. Run us into an asteroid field or something. Suck all the oxygen out of the place. It’d be a terrible mess. More than even your daddy could ever hope to fix, I bet. It’d prolly be pretty easy, if that’s what I was after.”</p><p>All at once, he’s terribly aware of the thing in his lap, the warmth and weight of it, the tiny expansions and contractions of the round little body with each breath. </p><p>The babe wasn’t a week old yet, wasn’t yet called Pol when Cobb had been invited to meet the new arrival. Triss, warm and sleepy and pleasantly shapeless on a moth-eaten divan, had pressed the little bundle into his arms, shown him how to cradle the baby’s head, and Jo had instantly told him how he was doing it wrong and adjusted his grip herself. He’d stared down at the little pinched pug-faced thing and decided it was remarkably ugly, and that it was a good thing he didn’t have one, and that he didn’t really ever want to hold it again, and that he’d wrestle a rancor barehanded to protect it. The conflicting impulses left him nauseous, and he spent the rest of that afternoon in the cantina trying to drink himself back onto solid ground.</p><p>Here, now, he’s terrifyingly sober and another small, ugly, precious thing is reaching up to touch his beard, purring softly, and Cobb hunches down awkwardly to give the grasping hands access to his face. </p><p>“I wouldn’t do that, you know,” he says as a three-fingered hand tugs just this side of too-hard on his facial hair. “I wouldn’t.”</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Time passes strangely with the lights still out, and by instinct, the three of them gravitate toward the cockpit more and more often in their resting hours. There’s something reassuring about the sense of work and order in the cockpit, and the stars beyond the viewports burn with light less infected-looking than the orange of the emergency lighting.</p><p>It’s during one of these out-of-time quiet hours, with the kid dozing in his seat-nest, that Cobb slides down in his seat to kick the back of the pilot’s chair obnoxiously until Din swivels around.</p><p>“You owe me. We’re not playing fair right now,” Cobb says, and smiles beatifically.</p><p>Predictably, Din’s brows jump for his hairline, then crumple back down, as if his face can’t quite decide what to do with itself. “How do you mean?” </p><p>Perched at the edge of his seat, Cobb leans forward, elbows on his knees and fingers laddered. “I mean, you’ve got the upper hand right now, partner. You’ve seen me puking my guts up and you’ve definitely helped me aim for the vac tube when I couldn’t see straight to piss. Not to mention I’ve already told you my sob story. You’ve got all the cards right now, see,” he says, and it’s the same voice he uses to haggle with fruit vendors in the market. “Way I see it, if we’re really gonna keep being good friends, you’re gonna have to give me a little collateral in return.”</p><p>There’s a weary, resigned angle to Din’s shoulders, but his fingers are jumping at the cuffs of his sleeves, tugging them down, then pushing them back up, then back down. “Didn’t realize I was asking so much of you by not letting you aspirate your own vomit,” he huffs, and the twist of his lips could either be a wry smile or a grimace. “What would make us even, then?” But there’s something defeated in his voice, as if he already knows.</p><p>“Sob story for sob story seems fair,” Cobb says. He reaches out, sets a mock-sympathetic hand on Din’s knee just to savor the minute flinch the contact produces. “C’mon, Mandalorian. I showed you mine, you show me yours now. What happened to you?”</p><p>“Don’t—” Din starts, then cuts off on a ragged exhale. His throat visibly bobs as he swallows the rest of whatever he was about to say, and he stares down at Cobb’s hand where it rests on his knee as if it’s a slowly encroaching spider. “It was… an accident.”</p><p>Several seconds crawl by as Cobb waits for him to elaborate, but nothing more seems to be forthcoming. “An accident?” he prods. “What, you trip and fall out of your armor?”</p><p>Din shakes his head jerkily. “No, there was an—an incident. Little moon in the Arkanis system. We’d barely dropped out of hyperspace, meant to resupply at Scaparus Port, but we picked up a tail. Right there, just as we went sublight, like they knew right where we’d be. Some kind of under-the-table freelancer, I guess. Not Guild.” His voice scrapes lower than usual, as if every word is being carved out of him with a whittling knife. “Made the jump back to hyperspace right away, but the ship’s been through the grinder lately. Thought the recent repairs would be enough, but the ‘drive choked and dumped us back out too soon. There was this little swamp moon, too close to avoid. The landing was… bad.”</p><p>“Crashed?” Din’s knee is hot under Cobb’s hand, even through the thick twill of his trousers.</p><p>“No, not exactly,” Din says slowly, and shakes his head. “Came in too hot, went nose-first into someone’s cutaway bog. Soft enough to prevent the worst of the damage. Hard enough to slam my head into the yoke, though.”</p><p>He leans sideways in his seat so that Cobb can see for the first time that one arm of the yoke is distinctly crooked, wrenched back against the steering column as if by great force. </p><p>Din continues: “Thought I was fine. Just dizzy. The helmet probably saved my skull from being stoved in, though. There was a peat farmer—it was his property. He was gracious about the damage, I remember. He invited us into his house. There were children, I think. His family. I don’t remember the house. I don’t remember a lot of that day, or the next. He was... a kind man. He was trying to help.”</p><p>To date, Cobb has never heard the man string together so many complete sentences in a row, but his storytelling is still abysmal. It’s difficult to follow his terse narrative train, but Cobb gets there in the end. “So, what, you were hurt in the landing? Concussed?” he says slowly.</p><p>Din nods, features taut. His eyes have gone curiously dull and shallow, like mud puddles. “Badly,” he agrees. “It’s hazy. I suppose the farmer treated me the best way he knew how, and took care of the kid, besides. He’d never heard of a Mandalorian. I don’t think he knew much beyond his peat bog. He was just a kind man trying to care for a stranger with a head injury, so...” He trails off, mouth pulling tight as if on drawstrings. </p><p>“So he took your helmet off,” Cobb finishes for him, and notes in a detached sort of way that his hand has crept up to rest on Din’s thigh. Din doesn’t seem inclined to move it, though he’s been watching its slow progress for the duration of his story. He seems to have surrendered, to Cobb maybe, or something else.</p><p>“I don’t even remember when it happened.” Din’s already quiet voice dips down into whisper territory, and he hunches forward. “He smiled when I woke up. His children were excited.”</p><p>Cobb remembers a night, not long ago but somehow too long ago now, a night spent at a Tusken campfire, pressed against an armored shoulder that provided little ambient warmth against the desert night. He remembers asking questions to pass the sleepless hours, the friendly, curious, unintentionally invasive sort of questions people like Cobb tended to ask people like the Mandalorian. <em> Where do you come from? Is the kid yours? Why don’t you take the helmet off? Do you look like him under there? </em></p><p>He’d been pleasantly surprised when the Mandalorian proved to be, if not an effusive conversationalist, a patient and unflinchingly honest one. He answered many of Cobb’s questions—not in any great depth, maybe, but answered them all the same. The kid was his by obligation, not by blood. The helmet he wore in deference to the Creed of his people, which prohibited its removal in the presence of other living things on penalty of expulsion. This had appealed to Cobb, at the time, this man-shaped unknowable thing that had deigned to sit with him at the fire, to involve himself in the small affairs of small people in a small town simply because Cobb asked it. There was power in that, he thought, something heady and pleasing. </p><p>“I reacted… poorly,” Din says, misery written into every line of him. “Frightened him. And his children. And then we left.” </p><p>“‘Poorly’?” Cobb repeats. “What’s ‘poorly’? </p><p>Din sighs. He looks as if he desperately wishes he were smaller. “Loudly,” he says. “Violently. Shamefully. Like a child. What else do you want me to say?”</p><p>“Violently? You kill him?”</p><p>“Not <em> that </em>violently.” Din glances up to shoot him a mildly appalled look. </p><p>Cobb drums his fingers on Din’s leg, maybe just to remind Din that his hand is there. He feels something close to giddy. “So, in review: you crash-landed in some poor backswamp farmer’s field, hit your head, and then threw a tantrum when he tried to help and scared a bunch of kids? And that’s what’s got you sleeping on the floor because you built a shrine to yourself in your bed?”</p><p>He’s become a mean, snarling thing now that he’s alone. He knows he’s said too much, crossed some too-thin line, but Din’s just sitting there and taking it now, head bowed against the weight of Cobb’s professed scorn. Maybe he thinks he deserves it. Cobb knows he doesn’t, wishes he did.</p><p><em> When will you realize that I don’t deserve your softness? </em>he wants to say.</p><p>“When did this happen?” he says instead.</p><p>Din seems to do some quick mental math. “Two weeks, maybe less.”</p><p>And now Cobb’s half out of his seat, one arm braced on the pilot’s chair, the other seizing Din by the jaw, tipping his head back so his face catches what little light there is. Din’s eyes are the color of an oncoming sandstorm, and his skin is so warm Cobb wants to crawl inside him. This close, the sick-and-tired yellow of a mostly healed shiner is visible in the hollows of both his eyes, and beneath the fringe of his dark hair his forehead is subtly mottled with the same discoloration. </p><p>“Must’ve been ugly, at the time,” Cobb murmurs, tracing the ridge of Din’s left orbital bone with his middle finger.</p><p>Din has gone corpse-still, and Cobb isn’t sure which of them the skittering pulse beneath his thumb belongs to. “Must’ve been,” Din agrees hoarsely.</p><p>Something within the ship sighs and shudders, and all at once, the cockpit is flooded with light, leaving the two of them blinking like small nighttime animals in headlights. </p><p>Cobb pulls his hand back and sinks back into his chair. “Looks like you fixed it,” he says, digging a knuckle into his eye to dispel the floaters in his vision.</p><p>“Somehow,” Din says unsteadily, and before Cobb can say anything more he’s up and moving toward the ladder, muttering something about checking the fuses again.</p><p>Cobb doesn’t turn to watch him disappear below. He leans over to adjust the blankets around the still-sleeping child in the other chair and wonders what sort of people the peat farmer and his family must’ve been. Small moon, small town, he figures. He wonders if the quiet of their little lives is something he would recognize. He climbs into the pilot’s chair so he can stare out the front viewport, and he thinks of the great tragedy of ordinary things, of the hilariously pointless and arbitrary construction of the chains being rattled on this ship.</p><p>He catches sight of his own reflection in the transparisteel of the viewport and realizes he’s laughing. He doesn’t remember starting, doesn’t know how he’ll stop.</p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>“You have to take me back to Tatooine sometime, you know,” Cobb remarks, watching a portion of polystarch slowly expand in a tin. He has no intention of eating it, but he wants credit for trying, anyway. </p><p>Din, sitting atop a nearby crate with the kid in his lap, pauses in his efforts to interest the child in a cube of veg-meat. “No, I don’t,” he says smoothly, then nibbles a corner off the mud-colored substance to show the kid that it’s good to eat, really.</p><p>Cobb jostles the tin and watches the half-formed loaf jiggle ominously. “Sooner you take me back, sooner you get your ship back. Won’t have to deal with me anymore.”</p><p>“I’m going to Corvus, to find the Child’s people,” Din says, trying to wrap the kid’s little hand around the unappealing foodstuff. “Tatooine isn’t on the way.” </p><p>Cobb barks a high, strange laugh. “<em> Please. </em>You’re not going to Corvus, or anywhere else. We’re just floating out here like pollen on the breeze. We could’ve been to Corvus and back three times already, if you were really going there.” He’s not actually sure if this is true. He’s never heard of Corvus, and doesn’t care to know where it is. “You’re just hiding out here in space like if maybe you sit still and quiet enough, life won’t notice you and you’ll just stop existing. Hell of an environment for a kid, Mandalorian.”</p><p>“And what would you call what <em> you </em>were doing when I found you?” Din’s voice is still low and calm, and he doesn’t look up. “Staggering around in broad daylight, barely able to speak Galactic Basic, vomit in your hair.”</p><p>“Well, I was trying to drink myself to death,” Cobb says brightly. “And succeeding. Sorta thought that was obvious.”</p><p>“And that’s much better than my coping strategy, of course.”</p><p>Cobb tries to smile, but instead just bares his teeth and hyena-cackles. “At least it’s <em> honest, </em>” he snarls. “I don’t have any obligation to stick around and give you something to feel superior to. We knew each other for, what, a handful of days, half a year ago? What claim do you think you have to me? Take. Me. Back.”</p><p>The air between them shivers, and the kid’s huge eyes flick from Din to Cobb and back. Finally, Din sighs and ducks his head, and the moment is punctured. </p><p>“I don’t want to,” he says, so quietly it might almost be the whine of the engine. “Not yet. I will. But not yet.” Every word sounds like <em> please. </em></p><p> </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>The child is asleep below, snug in his hammock. They should all be asleep.</p><p>Instead, Cobb is crowding Din against the doorframe of the cockpit, one forearm hard across his collarbones, other hand fisted in his hair. It would be so easy, Cobb knows, for the Mandalorian to shove him off, to make a clove-hitch knot of his spine and be done with him, but this is <em> Din </em>—Din, with his gentle hands and dark eyes and soft sad mouth—Din, who says he isn’t the Mandalorian. His strong arms are hanging loose at his sides, waiting, accepting.</p><p>“Look at me,” Cobb is saying, has been saying for the past few seconds or hours, over and over. This is what put them here against the doorjamb like this: Cobb is so, so tired of trying to spit venom into the eyes of a man who refuses to give him a steady target. “Fucking <em> look at me, </em>” he hisses again, fingers tightening in Din’s hair, wrenching his head up to account for their height difference.</p><p>And finally, Din does drag his wayward eyes up from wherever they’ve been wandering to look, really look, and there’s no word in Basic or any other language Cobb knows for the expression on his face. Cobb holds him there, pinning his head to the doorjamb hard enough to bruise. </p><p>Din is fever-hot under his hands, almost the temperature of Tatooine sand at midday. It makes Cobb ache down to his very bones with envy and homesickness, so he presses closer still and grinds their foreheads together, trying desperately to take back some of that familiar heat. “Vanth,” Din says on a shuddering exhale, and finally his hands come up to clutch at Cobb’s forearm as if, after submitting quietly (willingly) to being manhandled up out of his chair and slammed against the wall, this is the event horizon he’s trying to claw his way back from. </p><p>Although Cobb’s getting dizzy trying to hold eye contact this close, he still hisses with displeasure, rears back and yanks Din’s hair again when Din tries to shut his eyes again. “I said look at me. I didn’t tell you to stop.”</p><p>Obediently, Din opens his eyes and seeks out Cobb’s gaze. His hands are still on Cobb’s arm, but he doesn’t try to push him away. To the contrary, he almost seems to be holding him in place, as if afraid Cobb might drift away without an anchor. His voice is low and rough when he says again, “Vanth.”</p><p>“No.” Cobb punctuates his admonition with a shake of Din’s head. “No, you say my proper name. You say it right if you’re gonna say it at all.”</p><p>“Cobb?” Din tries again, unsure. His breath is fast and shallow against Cobb’s chin.</p><p>Din’s twitching hands are still latched onto Cobb’s arm when it slithers down from its place across his chest, and, without the weight of the pin, he almost seems as if he might be in danger of pitching forward and taking them both to the ground. His fingers flutter helplessly at Cobb’s wrist when, in one swift movement, Cobb yanks his shirttail out of his trousers and shoves his hand up under Din’s shirt, greedy for more of the heat that rolls off his body. </p><p>“My full and proper name, Din.” Cobb isn’t sure if he’s demanding or begging at this point. Maybe there’s no difference. “<em> Cobb Vanth. </em> You tell me my name. Say, ‘your name is Cobb Vanth,’ and say it right and pretty.” He lays his hand over Din’s navel, feeling the dip of his belly button right in the center of his palm and the prickle of hair on the pads of his fingers.</p><p>“Y-your name is Cobb Vanth,” Din stutters, and his eyes are locked onto Cobb’s now, wide and startled, as if he’s beyond remembering how to look away. </p><p>Cobb digs his fingertips in, thinks of the ring of little red half-moon indentations his blunt nails must be leaving in Din’s flesh, and presses harder, hoping to make them last. “That’s right,” he croons, leaning closer. Three inches more and he could kiss this man’s open frightened mouth, bite it bloody, drag him downstairs to that twice-damned little mirror in the ‘fresher and make him look at what they’ve done. He won’t. But he could, and lets the threat hang between them. “Now you tell me who I am. Tell me about Cobb Vanth.”</p><p>“Marshal.” The flesh of Din’s stomach jumps beneath Cobb’s hand as if there’s something alive beneath it, crawling around and looking for a way out. “In town, they called you the Marshal, said you wore armor. They said talk to the Marshal, so—” he cuts off with a strangled, ungraceful noise as Cobb’s hand slips suddenly southward, fingers worming their way beneath his waistband. His skin is even hotter, here, and getting hotter still as Cobb’s searching fingers move deeper. </p><p>There’s a belt to contend with, though, and Cobb is forced to tug his hand back out to wrestle with the buckle if he’s going to make any real progress. He doesn’t think he imagines the disappointment in the abortive little grunt that escapes Din when his hand withdraws. </p><p>Belt dealt with, Cobb thumbs open the fastenings of Din’s trousers and purrs, “Tell me about the Marshal.” Finally, he’s able to slip his hand inside comfortably, to reach down until he can comb his fingers through pubic hair, and he gives the tight curls a mean little tug just to make Din jump. </p><p>“Cobb—” Din starts, but Cobb shushes him, butting their foreheads together again for the barest moment.</p><p>“I said tell me about the Marshal,” Cobb says as he draws back, and lets his hand drift lower still until the backs of his knuckles graze the undeniable evidence of Din’s interest in the proceedings. “Come on, shy boy. Soft Din. Tell me about the Marshal.” His other hand is still fisted in Din’s dark hair, and he gives a sharp yank to force Din’s head back against the door and remind both of them that this isn’t kind or tender or anything approaching a good idea.</p><p>At some point, Din’s hands have crept up to clutch the front of Cobb’s shirt, and he just holds on, white-knuckled but neither pushing nor pulling. “They call him Marshal because he’s—he’s earned it,” he rasps. “Proven himself. Strong. He takes care of them, and they l-listen to him.” </p><p>“Good,” Cobb hums sweetly, even as some final string snaps inside him, some last tether. “And what’s his name again, this Marshal? Say it again, sweet thing.” </p><p>“Marshal Cobb Vanth,” Din says unsteadily, hurried, as if he can’t obey fast enough. </p><p>“Marshal Cobb <em> fucking </em>Vanth,” Cobb agrees, hot and cold and broken, and then he’s taking Din in hand, drawing him out of his pants and wrapping desert-dry fingers around him. </p><p>Din is reactive to the point of violence, jerking so hard he slams his own head back against the doorframe and hissing something in a language that sounds like he must surely have more than one tongue. Cobb gives him just two evil strokes, slow as sin, and then releases him. </p><p>“Marshal,” Din pleads, nearly dry-sobbing in protest, but then Cobb’s hand is at his mouth, palm pressed to his lips.</p><p>“Say that again, just like that, and then give me some wet to work with,” Cobb says, nails of his other hand scratching Din’s scalp almost soothingly.</p><p>“Marshal,” Din says again, breath hot against Cobb’s palm, and then he says it again, and again, and then the flat of his tongue is dragging up the length of Cobb’s hand, twice, three times. It’s not much to work with, but Cobb isn’t kind these days anyway.</p><p>It’s as much mercy as he’s capable of to reach down and take hold of Din’s cock again, to work him too slow and too rough all at once to make him say <em> Marshal, Marshal </em>, over and over, quiet and fevered as a prayer for rain. Cobb smiles into his face and says terrible things in an angel voice, reminds him to keep those eyes up, calls him soft and shy and sweet, tells him his brown eyes are so pretty and he says Cobb’s name so nice. </p><p>After all his squirming and gasping and <em> Marshal- </em>ing, Din is surprisingly silent when he comes, mouth slack and still so sad as he jerks and spills over Cobb’s hand. And then, as if his strings have been cut, he’s sinking to his knees, hands releasing Cobb’s shirt to trail down his torso. </p><p>“Marshal,” he says one more time from the floor, even as he’s twitching with the aftershocks.</p><p>That’s what does it. Marshal Cobb Vanth is suddenly just Cobb again, tired and jittery and thinner than he’s ever been in his adult life, standing over the shivering wreckage of a man who once rode into town like some old two-bit holo hero and told Cobb to raise his child if he didn’t emerge from the dragon’s maw. Din’s trembling hands are holding onto Cobb’s kneecaps, still staring up into Cobb’s eyes as if he’s waiting for permission to stop. </p><p>Cobb’s still got one hand on Din’s head like a priest bestowing a blessing, and his other hand is dripping with cooling cum. He doesn’t know what to do with it. He doesn’t have a rag. He feels caught red-handed, judged and doomed. It might be panic that makes him try to wipe it off in Din’s sweaty curls. </p><p>Now they’re both a disaster. Cobb looks at the mess he’s made of Din’s hair, of his own hand, of both of them, and for the first time since that last ride out of Mos Pelgo, feels a sob tear itself from his chest.</p><p>“Okay,” Din is saying, eye-level again now somehow—how did he move so quickly? “Okay. Okay.” Cobb doesn’t know what’s okay. He thinks about asking, but instead he just makes an ugly open-mouthed sound and thinks his face might be disintegrating.</p><p>Din’s hands are on Cobb’s shoulders, and he’s frog-marching the both of them back toward the ladder, and they’re in the refresher, and they’re standing under the sonic shower with their clothes on, both of them, and Cobb thinks he might never dry up and stop crying but Din’s hands are big and gentle and warm on his arms. And then Din is laying him down in the bed that isn’t a bed, arranging him on his side like a shrimp, and then Din is carefully tucking himself into the curve of Cobb’s body, and his back is still warm against Cobb’s chest, and he’s drawing Cobb’s arm over him and pressing Cobb’s hand into the very middle of himself. </p><p>It’s the way Cobb often inflicts himself on Din in the night lately, and up until now he’s thought it was to punish Din for being Din and not the Mandalorian, or maybe for not showing up to save them all again, or maybe for not letting Cobb disappear along with his town. But as he lays there curled around Din now, he understands that was never it at all. </p><p>Din is murmuring to him, some low song maybe, or something else, and Cobb tucks his face into the back of Din's warm neck, against the knobs of his vertebrae. They sleep, and the child’s hammock sways gently overhead.</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. between the trains we're waiting for</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>ah whoops, looks like it's 4 chapters now. next one is the last one, promise. also, is boot-sharing a trope? it is now, i guess.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Hyperspace, Cobb decides as he stumbles into the cockpit, looks a lot like something he vaguely recalls puking up on a ‘fresher floor during his recent marathon overindulgence. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Finally had enough of me, then?” he says, and clears his throat—his voice sounds startlingly disused to his own ears, as if he’d spent five days asleep instead of five hours. His skeleton feels like a poor fit inside him this morning, like maybe some of his bones have gone missing overnight and others have grown too large to compensate. He wonders if he looks as crooked and crumpled as he feels.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The pilot’s chair swivels around to face him, and suddenly he’s pinned like an insect beneath the weight of Din’s grave stare. “What do you mean?” Din says, tilting his head. The kid is in his lap, sucking his own tiny fist and somehow contriving to look terribly imperious and critical despite the slobber soaking the sleeve of his robe. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“We’re on the move, looks like. Gonna drop me back on Tatooine?” Cobb jerks his chin at the nauseating lightshow beyond the viewports. “Or, what, we goin’ somewhere else? Corvus, you said?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din regards him for a long quiet moment, gaze too rigid on Cobb’s face, as if the nerves behind his eyes have been paralyzed. He blinks too much, like a man staring into the sun, and it makes Cobb twitchy to watch. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Keep those eyes up, </span>
  </em>
  <span>Cobb had said last night, and he knows now that this was one of those wishes stupid boys in fireside stories make of sand-devils, the kind of monkey-lizard’s-paw wish that goes down sweet at first but quickly rots black and poisons everything. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Give me wealth, </span>
  </em>
  <span>says the stupid boy, and everything he touches turns to silicax, including his pretty young wife. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Keep those eyes up, </span>
  </em>
  <span>says another stupid boy, and then those eyes are his, irrevocably, and he finds he can’t bear the weight of them. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Neither,” Din says finally. “I’ve laid in a course for Pii IV. Should be there in a day or so, by Tatooine reckoning.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Pee-four?” Cobb grimaces. “Sounds charming.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din’s mouth twists awkwardly at one corner like there’s been a mutiny among his facial muscles. “</span>
  <em>
    <span>I</span>
  </em>
  <span> didn’t name it that.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb folds himself into the empty passenger seat and waves at the kid, who burbles a few wet consonants and waves back. Cobb wishes both occupants of the pilot’s seat would stop staring at him. The child might not be Din’s by blood, but there’s an unsettling similarity to their eyes that gives Cobb acute heebie-jeebies. “Alright, then. I’ll bite,” he says. “What’s on Pee-four? Little green guys like the kid?” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” Din says simply, and turns back to the console.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The sudden absence of the intense eye-contact leaves Cobb feeling mildly winded. He’s not sure if he’s relieved or not. “Okay, so why’re we going there, exactly?” he asks the blank headrest.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din sighs and gently nudges the kid’s sticky hand off an important-looking lever. “Because it’s charming,” he says, sounding a thousand years old.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The cockpit feels somehow larger and far too small in the weird light of hyperspace, every little shadow twisting in a way that looks far too intentional. Cobb has the hideous feeling that there’s something just beyond his peripheral vision, or worse, maybe some wriggling parasite swimming through the whites of his eyes. His back is to the door, but he can feel it yawning behind him, can almost hear terrible gasping echoes of </span>
  <em>
    <span>Marshal, Marshal</span>
  </em>
  <span> beneath the vibrations of the engine like the sort of canyon echo that doesn’t seem to have any discernible source. He considers going back to sleep, but there are ghosts tangled in the bedding, too warm and expectant.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There are dark eyes over Din’s shoulder—the child, peering at Cobb from the crook of Din’s neck. Cobb is suddenly struck with another memory of Pol, of an early evening midsummer celebration at the cantina with Jo and Triss. Triss, who never partook of anything stronger than herbal tea, dandled the baby on her knee for most of the evening, but had handed him over to Jo when she went to use the facilities. The baby had gotten this </span>
  <em>
    <span>look</span>
  </em>
  <span> on its face as its big pale eyes swiveled between its de-facto father and Cobb—both a little more than pleasantly warm with imported wine. It was a weary, waspish, old sort of look, as if the baby knew that neither of them were in full command of themselves and would’ve told them off if it had any command of language yet. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Mah,” says the little green baby, squinched-up eyes mother-in-law sharp, the kind of eyes that know something a child has no business knowing, and Cobb’s insides lose all structural integrity. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Gonna go use the sonic,” he mumbles to the kid, with no intention of doing any such thing. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>As he goes, he can’t help but picture himself as some kind of foul liquid by-product dribbling out of the chair and slithering down to the hold to puddle uselessly on the floor. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The ship rocks in the gentle grip of hyperspace, and Cobb, in his own designated bed, pulls a reeking tarp over his head and hopes he might manage to casually suffocate himself in his sleep. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He knows without looking across the hold that the covers are still drawn aside in Din’s pretend-bed, knows there’s been room left for him, that there’s a warm and waiting body bowed into an apostrophe around a Cobb-shaped lagoon. Just hours ago, he would’ve crawled right in uninvited, would’ve claimed that space with a sneer and called the reluctantly-shared warmth shit recompense for some nebulous debt. Now, he understands that he’s been buying comfort on credit, and he’ll have no way of settling when the bill comes due. Worse yet, he suspects (fears) that Din expects nothing of him, that he’s perfectly willing to let Cobb run up an endless tab with no hope of repayment.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s better for him to keep to his own side of the ship, Cobb knows, no matter how the chill of the floor creeps up through his clothes and makes him shiver. He’s already taken far more than he’s owed, and knows he’ll take more if it’s within reach. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Among the slaves, there were always stories of hungry canyon-haints, long ago dried-out things that didn’t realize they were past saving. These were the sorts of stories that you could always trace back to some overseer hoping to dissuade the superstitious from making a break for it, and rumors of mostly-dead things that would sup from the living if given half a chance weren’t ineffective. Some part of Cobb had never quite managed to shake the residue of such stories from his mind, even long after he was free. Looking at the thirsty gaping maw of any Tatooine canyon, it was just too easy to believe.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Somewhere on the other side of the cargo hold, Cobb’s sure Din is awake and watching, breath shallow and fingers twitching as he waits for Cobb to ask something of him, to demand one more hot mouthful of flesh and bone and blood to nourish a dessicated soul. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Though they’re a rare sight, there are trees on Tatooine—mostly twisted, stunted things with thorns the length of a man’s thumb and corrosive sap making the wood more trouble than it’s worth. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The trees on Pii IV are like nothing Cobb has ever seen. Granted, nothing on Pii IV is like anything Cobb has ever seen.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“They’re red,” he says, and he doesn’t remember grabbing hold of Din’s arm, but now he thinks that if he were to let go, all his atoms might fly apart. He’d vastly underestimated the dizzying unreality of stepping out onto another world for the first time.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Greel trees,” he hears Din say, though it’s difficult above the roaring of blood in his ears. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Everything on Tatooine tends to be sort of squat by necessity: buildings due to precious few materials, flora and fauna on account of the climate. There are mountains, sure, and high rolling dunes, but it’s easy to forget the height of something when it’s been written on your bones over the course of a lifetime. Cobb’s seen holos of other planets, knows intellectually that he’s lived a small life in a small place, but he doesn’t think anything could’ve prepared him for this. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Here, the trees are taller than any Jawa sandcrawler, ramrod-straight and sheathed in bark that looks like poorly butchered meat left to spoil in the sun. Cobb thinks it might take three of him standing in a circle, fingertip-to-fingertip, to span the circumference of one of those bloodred trunks. The terrain is mountainous, chalk-pale and jagged, and the roots of the trees are threaded through the stone like offal between a predator’s teeth. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Far worse than the trees is the little mountain lake a stone’s throw from the ship’s ramp. Cobb steadfastly keeps his eyes straight ahead and refuses to look at it. The idea of so much water in one place is beyond his capacity to cope with just now. Better to come to terms with the ugly trees and the iron-gray sky and the singular sun first, he’s decided. One step at a time.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You gonna drop me here or somethin’?” he finds himself mumbling through lips gone half-numb. “That why we’re here?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What? No.” Din sounds mildly offended at the suggestion, and Cobb drags his eyes to where his fingers are tightening on Din’s bicep without his permission. “No. It’s just. It’s quiet here. Out of the way. And there’s a logging outpost nearby where we can resupply.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb goes, “Oh,” and his deathgrip on Din’s arm lessens, but only just. He watches his own thumb rubbing at Din’s sleeve, repetitive and childish self-soothing motions. He should let go. He shouldn’t be touching, not anymore. His hand has an agenda of its own, though, and he’s just along for the ride. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The urge to push forward and hide his face in the crook of Din’s neck is a powerful one, but he resists. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You’re a long way from home, stranger, </span>
  </em>
  <span>he thinks, and it’s not his own voice in his head but the gravelly drawl of a weequay bartender. He turns away to vomit politely over the side of the ramp. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Night is softer, easier to deal with. Pii IV has two absurd little moons, distinctly lumpy and lard-yellow, but they’re comforting all the same. Celestial bodies are far more pleasing in twos, Cobb has decided.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Long after the single sun has dipped below the horizon, there’s still a lazy sort of brownish light in the sky, more than enough to see by. It mellows the grotesque red of the trees, gives the pale mountains a sweet buttery glow. They eat rehydrated and reconstituted things side-by-side on the ramp, the two of them, legs dangling in the air and ankles knocking.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The kid plays on the pebbled lakeshore under Din’s watchful eye, apparently holding an engaging conversation with himself as he waddles around in pursuit of little hopping and creeping nighttime critters. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“And you’re sure nothing’s going to come up out of the water and drag him back down to the depths to be devoured?” Cobb slides Din a sideways glance, only half-joking.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m sure,” Din huffs, and some sad little part of Cobb glories in the accompanying lopsided almost-smile. After a brief pause, Din amends, “Mostly.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The kid pitches his little body to the ground, pouncing unsuccessfully on something and whining when he comes up empty-handed. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ve never been off Tatooine, y’know,” Cobb says, sandwiching his hands between his thighs against a sudden chill.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din’s eyes don’t leave the kid for a second, but his chin tilts in Cobb’s direction. “I know. I mean, I can tell,” he says softly. His slouch becomes more pronounced, more of a protective huddle, and he says, “I’m sorry.” It’s a heavy apology, one of those </span>
  <em>
    <span>I’m sorry</span>
  </em>
  <span>s that contains multitudes. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>For what? </span>
  </em>
  <span>Cobb could ask. Instead, he echoes, “I’m sorry,” and wonders if it’s for past transgressions, or if it’s preemptive. He can never be sure of himself, these days. He looks at Din’s hands, folded in his lap, and remembers the weight and warmth of them on his arms. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and the word sits sour on the back of his tongue.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Muuh,” the kid is saying, and he’s looking up at them from below their feet with something many-legged and glistening clutched in his hands. He holds it out to them, looking proud of himself.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din nods gravely down at the child. “Good catch,” he says.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Muh,” the kid says again, waving the struggling thing at Cobb this time, as if waiting on his approval as well.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Well, that’s very nice,” Cobb says. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The kid smiles angelically at him for just a second before stuffing the wriggling thing into his mouth. A single forlorn croak sounds from inside the kid’s mouth before the unfortunate creature is swallowed whole.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb blinks. “Mother of twelve shitting bathas,” he mutters. “That thing wasn’t poisonous or anything, was it?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din’s shoulders shift in a helpless shrug. “We’ll find out, I guess,” he sighs heavily.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>A weight settles behind Cobb in his stale-smelling bed, perched atop the bedding near enough to radiate heat, but not touching. Din would never, not without an invitation. He’s good like that. Better than Cobb.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Are you cold?” Din murmurs, not fooled for a second by Cobb’s attempt at faking slow sleep-breathing. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Without opening his eyes, Cobb can picture Din kneeling at a respectful distance (but still within easy reach), straight-backed and stiff with his hands on his knees like a temple supplicant. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Yes, I’m cold, </span>
  </em>
  <span>Cobb almost says.</span>
  <em>
    <span> I’m always cold. I think I might die of it, sometimes.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>You’re very warm, </span>
  </em>
  <span>he almost says.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>What he says aloud is: “No.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay,” Din says. He’s still and silent for a moment more, and then: “I’m sorry.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The balled-up tarp beneath Cobb’s head is becoming wet and tacky. He turns his face into the discomfort of it and whispers, “You gotta stop saying that.” It sounds like an admonishment, but really, he’s begging.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He expects Din to stand up and withdraw to his own side of the hold, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t come closer, but he doesn’t move further away, either. “So do you,” he says. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At some earlier point, Din had told him that nights on Pii IV are hours shorter than nights on Tatooine. All the same, in a life that has been full of long nights, Cobb doesn’t remember a longer night than this one. The hours crawl by like animals searching for a place to die, and Cobb stares crazily at the wall while Din kneels at his back, waiting to be needed.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Sunrise on Pii IV is an anemic, unremarkable affair, and Din pushes his boots into Cobb’s arms as they’re both still swallowing the last of their breakfasts.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The boots are heavy, and Cobb nearly drops them in his surprise. “What, you want me to polish these or somethin’? Didn’t realize that was a layer of our relationship.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din doesn’t dignify that with a response. “I need you to visit the outpost,” he says. He’s back to talking to Cobb’s chin or his forehead, and Cobb can’t decide if he’s relieved or disappointed. “We need rations, whatever they have. As much as you can carry. Pay whatever they want, within reason.” He sticks a bulging leather coin purse in one of the boots. “Last I was here, they were still favoring Imperial credits, but they might prefer wupiupi or New Republic credits now. There’s some of each in there.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb’s brain is working through a five-minute lag. “How come you’ve only got one pair of boots?” seems like the most important question at the moment.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ve only got one pair of feet.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb snorts. “Even </span>
  <em>
    <span>I </span>
  </em>
  <span>have a spare pair of boots.”  </span>
  <em>
    <span>Had</span>
  </em>
  <span> a spare pair, anyway. Now, in all fairness, he doesn’t even have one pair. But the point stands.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Just put them on,” Din says wearily. “Daylight doesn’t last long here.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The boots are too big, steel-toed and impossibly bulky, and Cobb has to put on another pair of socks and lace them as tight as they’ll go just so they don’t flop around clownishly when he walks. There’s something very strange about literally walking in another man’s shoes, but Cobb doesn’t think he’s going to learn anything new about Din from the experience other than that Din has comically large feet for his height.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din loads Cobb up with empty bags and a ration bar and marches him outside and down the ramp. The morning is windy and humid, and it feels unpleasantly like being breathed on by an enormous unseen mouth. “You can see it from here, see? Just over that rise.” Din points between towering red trees, and he’s right: just beyond the craggy brow of a not-so-distant hill, Cobb can see blue smoke curling up from tubular chimneys, rickety old short-range antennas sticking up like sun-bleached ribs—painfully familiar hallmarks of a little nowhere-town populated by grim, sensible people. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Remind me why you can’t just go, again? I’m gonna trip, wearing these,” Cobb says, although some part of him is already itching to go, some irrational part that thinks beyond that ridge, he might find something he recognizes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It takes him a moment to realize that Din hasn’t answered, that he’s just standing there with his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets and his face turned away toward the lake. “I...” he starts, and stops again, worrying his chapped bottom lip between his teeth. “I think it’s better if you go.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’re not gonna just take off and leave me here while I’m gone, right?” Cobb asks. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A rusty noise that sounds suspiciously like a laugh scrapes out of Din’s chest. It isn’t a nice noise. “You have my only pair of boots,” he says, and shrugs. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The only way into town is to clamber over the ragged teeth of the ridge, and Cobb is careful to watch his feet as he goes. He glances back only once, not far along, and sees Din still stood there watching, barefoot and small amid the scarlet trees, haloed by the pale morning light coruscating across the troubled surface of the lake.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The little logging outpost is more populous than Mos Pelgo had been, but only just.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb’s seen timber-framed buildings before, in Mos Eisley and Mos Espa, silly ostentatious Hutt-era things of expensive imported lumber. They never last long on Tatooine; if they aren’t snapped like toothpicks by one bad sandstorm or gnawed to sawdust by beetles, the wood is poached by opportunistic resellers in the night. The buildings here are different—rough, joyless notched-log rectangles arranged like crooked teeth on either side of a dirt thoroughfare. Everywhere, there’s evidence of boom-town industry: strange long-necked machines towering like rontos, enormous flatbed speeders laden with timber, hulking droids outfitted with vibro-saws. It’s not so very different from a mining town, and Cobb’s stomach twists horribly around the ration bar he’d forced himself to eat on the way.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Everywhere, there are eyes on him—it’s the carefully disinterested, unimpressed </span>
  <em>
    <span>you-ain’t-from-around-here-are-you </span>
  </em>
  <span>stare of a hard people scraping a living out of a hard place, the sort of people who don’t have time for new faces and new troubles, and it’s so familiar that Cobb’s throat burns.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A surly reigat points him reluctantly in the direction of the traders’, but Cobb pulls up short before he enters the ugly little building. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At the far fringes of the outpost, a motley array of light freighters and shuttles hunches like a flock of gargoyles at the lip of a cliff. It’s a hive of activity, between lumber shipments being loaded into cargo-holds and scowling spacers smoking in the shadows of equally unfriendly-looking ships. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It would be terribly easy, Cobb thinks, to take these borrowed boots and this purse heavy with credits and score passage to anywhere but here. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He could make his way back to Tatooine, back to the dry heat he knows, and hole up in some other nowhere-town inn with as much booze as Din’s money can buy (and maybe a whore with the sweetest, darkest eyes he can find). Then again, he could find some quiet corner to waste away in on any planet, he supposes, somewhere Din would never have reason to look for him. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Would</span>
  </em>
  <span> Din look for him? </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’d be easy, yes, and maybe best. Din would have his kid, his ship, his silence, and Cobb would have his oblivion. They wouldn’t be able to wound one another further with a half-dozen parsecs between them.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb doesn’t realize he’s been obstructing the doorway of the traders’ until he’s shouldered none-too-gently aside with a muttered curse. He scrambles out of the grumbling human’s way and leans against the rough wood of the wall for a moment, breathing loudly through his nose and staring down his feet. His heart beats like a sandstorm rattling the door in the night.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Karking </span>
  <em>
    <span>boots,</span>
  </em>
  <span>” he groans finally, and peels himself off the wall and enters the shop.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Rations enough for two grown men and one endlessly hungry child for any length of time make for a heavy burden, and Cobb is sweating like two tatoo-rats humping in a wool sock by the time he crests the final ridge on his way back to the ship. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The pale sun is high, and Din is crouching in the shallows of the lake with his trousers rolled up to his knees, hands hovering behind the kid as he paddles in the water. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Shopping’s done,” Cobb calls as he approaches, and both Din and the child look up.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din stoops to pluck the child from the water, and tosses Cobb an awkward little waist-high wave as he sloshes back to shore. “You’re back,” he says. To any other ear, it might sound like a greeting, or even an offhand observation, but Cobb knows there’s a weight to those two words beyond the sum of their syllables. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He realizes with a pang that Din sent him into town with at least a partial expectation that he might do exactly the thing he’d almost done—take the boots and the money and leave. Din wouldn’t have stopped him. He’d freely given Cobb the means and the freedom to go, and now was welcoming him back with one of his shy, twitchy little almost-smiles. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>All of Cobb’s organs make a sudden northward lurch, as if they’re all trying to push something enormous and foreign up out of his throat. The bags land heavily at his feet, scattering their contents, and he leans forward as Din draws close, slumping to rest his forehead against Din’s sternum, next to the child cradled in the crook of one arm. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m back,” he agrees, and lets his eyes drift closed as one of Din’s big warm hands comes up to cup his elbow, gently and without expectation.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Buu,” the kid adds solemnly, and grabs Cobb’s earlobe.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The night is muggy and too warm, and Din remarks that they’ve arrived at the height of Pii IV’s brief summer. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s late, and the child is asleep inside. They two of them are sitting side-by-side on the ramp, bare feet swinging in the air, wiping sweat from their foreheads with the palms of their hands. Din, for the first time since this strange trip began, has foregone his layers of outerwear, and has rolled his sleeves up to elbows. The ship is silent, but the night is raucous with frogsong. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ve stopped here a few times before, when jobs have taken me out as far as Bothan Space,” Din explains, and hooks his ankle around Cobb’s for the briefest second before pulling it back. “It’s, you know. Out of the way. Quiet.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s odd to think of the Mandalorian existing in the quiet moments between bringing in bounties and leaping into dragons’ mouths. He tries to picture himself sitting here with a man resplendent in full armor, tries to imagine their arms pressing together and their legs tangling pointedly every so often, but the image is laughable. Not so with Din, as he is now. Din is a man made for quiet moments.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It is definitely out of the way,” Cobb agrees blandly.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din shifts his weight and clears his throat. “I thought. I don’t know. That you might like it.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb looks around, taking in the ominous silhouettes of the trees, the skeletal mountains, the distant mechanical sounds of logging activity. “I absolutely do not,” he says, and Din emits an inelegant snort of laughter that surprises both of them. Cobb grins crookedly at the sound and adds, “Never thought I’d see a planet uglier than mine.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Your planet isn’t ugly,” Din protests softly, and not for the first time in their acquaintance, Cobb is struck with the urge to crawl down the man’s throat and hibernate in the cavity of his chest.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>With the arrival of night, the wind has died down completely, and the lake is a golden-dark mirror of the sky. It occurs to Cobb that he’s warm, really and properly warm for the first time in days. Too warm. He nudges Din with his elbow. “Well, I’m a lifelong Tatooine boy, as you know,” he says. “So since you’ve dragged me here anyway, we might as well go swimming. Who knows when I’ll have the chance again.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din’s hand is somewhat distressingly slippery and limp as Cobb hoists him to his feet and leads him down to the lakeshore. His fingers are twitchy and he can’t seem to decide if he’s supposed to squeeze back or not, so Cobb holds on tight enough for both of them.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Never done this before, so you’re gonna have to make sure I don’t drown,” Cobb chuckles as he pulls his hideous borrowed shirt over his head. He considers, for the briefest moment, leaving his trousers on, but he’s not sure if Din has more spares to offer (not to mention, that’s just not how these things are </span>
  <em>
    <span>done</span>
  </em>
  <span>, according to every cheesy holo he’s ever seen). He leaves them in a heap at his ankles.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>In contrast, Din isn’t even halfway out of his shirt. He’s gone jakrab-in-headlights rigid, hands fisted in the hem of his shirt, which has barely been pulled up over his navel. He’s looking down, maybe at his shirt, maybe at his hands, and he looks mildly disoriented, like he’s just toppled out of bed and woken up on the floor. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He’d gone willingly when Cobb had dragged him out of his chair and slammed him up against the doorframe, too.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey,” Cobb says as softly as he can manage around his suddenly-obstructed throat. Din’s head snaps up to look at him. “You don’t—we don’t have to, you know. We can forget about it. If you don’t want to.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>In a way, Din’s usual discomfort with eye-contact has been a mercy all along. It’s a hell of a thing, Cobb now knows, to be on the receiving end of the full weight of his gaze. There’s a plea in those eyes, though they’re dark with frustration. “I want to,” he says, so quietly it might as well be a breeze on the lake. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay,” Cobb says.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>(</span>
  <em>
    <span>Okay, </span>
  </em>
  <span>Din had said, over and over, as helped Cobb wash away the evidence of what they’d done. What Cobb had done. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Okay, okay.</span>
  </em>
  <span>)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb says again, “Okay,” as he closes the small distance between them and takes hold of Din’s hands. He pries them gently from the hem of the shirt, then carefully pulls the shirt back down, adjusting it the way he might dress a child. Din frowns and opens his mouth as if to object, but Cobb just takes his hands again and tugs him toward the lake. “Okay. Come on.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The water is much warmer than he would have expected—it retains the heat of the sun even now, long after dark, and it offers little relief from the stale warmth of the night even as they wade out into deeper water. It makes Cobb think of water pulled from a vaporator’s reservoir at the end of the day, before it’s been stored somewhere dark to cool. The bottom of the lake is silty and hairy with some kind of underwater grass, and it tangles between their toes as they go.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Think I gotta stop here,” Cobb says once the water is at their armpits. Any further out, and he’d really have to try swimming. Even here, the water exerts a light but insistent pressure on his ribcage. He’s not nervous, exactly, but he’s also not sure if he likes it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They stand there like that for a long silent minute, marinating not two feet from one another in tepid water, clothed and unclothed. Din’s shirt has trapped some air beneath it and bubbles out slightly around his arms and shoulders. It’s a little funny, Cobb thinks, but neither of them laughs.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>This is, Cobb supposes, the final strangeness, the thing that truly cements how utterly out of his element he is. Chest-deep in water, no sand in sight, he couldn’t get further from Tatooine if he were to travel to the other end of the galaxy. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He hears himself say, “I want to go home.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din’s hand has been in his since they walked into the water, he realizes only when it’s pulled away. “I’ll take you back to Tatooine,” Din says. “If that’s what you want.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, I mean—what I mean to say is, I want to go </span>
  <em>
    <span>home</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Home-home. The home I made, that I fought for. Killed for. But it isn’t there.” Cobb makes a half-hearted attempt to recapture Din’s hand, but he can’t find it in the water and his fist closes on nothing. “That ever happen to you? The only place you want to be isn’t there anymore? You can picture it like you’re there, hell, you can </span>
  <em>
    <span>taste </span>
  </em>
  <span>it. But it’s not real anymore.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yes.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Something suddenly brushes his bare flank, and he jerks in horror. “The hell was that?” he hisses. “Is there something swimming around in here?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sorry, sorry,” Din says quickly, and the touch is back, firmer and less tentative. “That was just me.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh,” Cobb relaxes. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The hand resting on his hip is, impossibly, even warmer than the water. It’s steady, and steadying. He leans into it, this one real thing in an unreal place. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I always want to go home,” Din says, head tilting. “In the way you want to, I mean. And sometimes I don’t even know which home I’m thinking of.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He doesn’t offer any additional details, and Cobb is selfishly grateful. He doesn’t know if he could handle another sad story on top of the ones already between them, not right now, and he is coming to understand that Din is a house built atop a graveyard.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But there’s another hand on him now, resting on his other hip in an exact mirror of the other, and Din’s thumbs are brushing his hipbones in small circles, slow and repetitive and soothing. Caught gently between those two strong hands, Cobb feels as if he’s being molded back into something that almost makes some kind of sense, something recognizably human. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I think I want to go under the water, just really quick, just once,” he decides. “Will you make sure I come back up? I don’t know what I’m doing with all this.” He gestures expansively at the water, but he’s not sure if that’s really what he’s talking about.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din nods once, gravely. “Of course.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Drawing in one last deep breath, Cobb pinches his nose with one hand and covers his mouth with the other, screws his eyes shut as tight as he can and lets himself drop beneath the surface of the water until it closes softly over the crown of his head. Din’s hands remain firmly in place as he sinks down, and distantly he realizes that Din must have followed him under the water in order to keep hold of him. They must be face-to-face, here, in this dark and airless nowhere.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>All at once, Din’s hands urge him inexorably upward, and he blinks and splutters as he breaks the surface. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay?” Din is saying, one of his hands separating itself from Cobb so he can dash the water out of his eyes and push his dripping hair back.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb scrubs a hand over his face and shakes his head like a wet animal. “I don’t think I like swimming,” he says, and finds himself laughing. “Too much of the desert in me, I guess.” He feels shivery and scraped-out, as if he’s been in the grip of a days-long fever that’s finally broken.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>As they wade back to shore, Din’s hand slips from Cobb’s waist. “I can’t swim either, you know,” he remarks, and Cobb laughs harder.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The night is still stiflingly warm, and a gnarled fallen log the color of old blood seems as good a place as any to sit and drip-dry. Greel tree bark isn’t the most comfortable surface to park your bare ass on, Cobb reflects, but somehow it still seems like the thing to do. Fresh out of the water, Din looks like an unfortunate soul plucked half-drowned from a shipwreck: his rough gray shirt appears to have grown two sizes and hangs nearly to his knees, while his trousers cling to his legs as absurdly as any twi’lek dancing girl. He sinks to the ground with a groan, back against the log and shoulder pressed to Cobb’s bare leg. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It should be strange, sitting naked outdoors on some strange planet next to a clothed man he barely knows, one he’s spent the better part of a week trying to tear to pieces. And maybe it is strange, but all the same somehow appropriate, given the circumstances of his life now.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The damp ends of Din’s hair are brushing Cobb’s thigh, and they’re both soaked through with water from the same still dark-rum lake. They’ve both been submerged and pulled back up into foreign air, blinking like new and untested things, so it’s natural for Cobb’s hand to creep into the wild mess of Din’s dark hair, easy for him to twist the curls around his fingers and tug just a bit—not enough to hurt, not anymore. Just enough to make him shiver, make him press his shoulder harder into Cobb’s leg. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’re a good man,” Cobb tells him, and he’s surprised to find he means simply that. It isn’t a backhanded comparison to wound himself with anymore, just a statement of fact. He says it again, just because he can, and because it doesn’t hurt: “You’re good.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din is leaning into his hand now, head tilted down to engage the attentions of Cobb’s fingers. It’s a guileless, animal sort of silent request, and Cobb is more than happy to oblige. He drags his nails gently along Din’s scalp, rubs a thumb behind one of his ears, teases the overgrowth at the nape of his neck. Cobb wishes he could see Din’s face from where he’s sitting, maybe watch his eyes drift shut due to something other than shame or discomfort. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Good,” Cobb says again, enjoying the mouthfeel of the word, and something buzzes beneath his fingertips. Din is humming, he realizes, almost too low to be heard. Experimentally, he gives a fistful of Din’s hair a slightly more insistent tug, murmuring, “So good.” And yeah, there it is: Din makes that quiet sound again, a low rumble in his chest, something like a purr maybe, or a moan.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din turns his face up to look at him then, and Cobb thinks it’s funny how he’s never thought of the word </span>
  <em>
    <span>yes</span>
  </em>
  <span> as being a facial expression before, but there it is, written in painfully honest lines between Din’s eyes, in the seam of his lips. Maybe he’d have seen it before, he supposes, if he hadn’t been looking so hard for </span>
  <em>
    <span>no.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Petting one of Din’s eyebrows with the pad of his thumb, Cobb asks, “Would it be alright if I kissed you?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t know,” Din says, and presses his face into the palm of Cobb’s hand again, just briefly. “No. Not yet.” Cobb doesn’t have time to draw back or even feel properly disappointed before Din has repositioned himself to kneel between Cobb’s knees with his hot hands on Cobb’s shins. His eyes are black as the bottom of the lake, and Cobb doesn’t remember ever getting this hard so fast.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He swallows, hands falling to his sides to seek purchase on the craggy bark beneath him. “What would you like, then?” he asks. “Whatever you want.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’d like to suck your cock,” is Din’s immediate response, and his thumbs rub along the lines of Cobb’s shinbones. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>If he were any kind of praying man, hymns would have been falling from Cobb’s mouth. “Right to the point, eh?” he croaks. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din shrugs. “Never done it before,” he says, awfully matter-of-fact for a man whose hands are sliding up another man’s legs to thumb insistently at the insides of his knees. “I’d like to try. If that’s alright.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Never—oh hell, please don’t tell me you’ve never—you’d never—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m a Mandalorian, not a monk,” Din says dryly, looking distinctly unimpressed. “Wearing a helmet all the time just isn’t conducive to sucking cock, that’s all.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh, well that’s alright then,” Cobb says, and he doesn’t like how shrill he sounds in his own ears. “In that case, yeah, go right ahead. Uh, please.” He’d sort of thought he was in control of this encounter, but it’s quickly getting away from him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>(He very carefully does not point out that Din had referred to himself as a Mandalorian in the present tense, but something about it flares golden in his stomach like good whiskey.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Patiently, deliberately, Din nudges Cobb’s knees further apart for better access, and spends a good few seconds examining his crotch in solemn silence, as if it’s a battlefield he’s attempting to map out in his mind. Cobb’s just about to crack wise—</span>
  <em>
    <span>I promise, it won’t bite</span>
  </em>
  <span>—when Din’s damp hand wraps around the root of him and puts an end to any coherent sentence he might’ve strung together. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s a strange thing, trying to reconcile the shining silver dragon-slayer with this man, this soft-eyed man on his knees in soggy, ill-fitting clothes, dragging a curious tongue up the length of Cobb’s dick. Then again, the dogged determination is the same, Cobb decides as Din’s lips wrap around the head of him. And the keen strategic mind he’d glimpsed is apparent even in this: Din mouth moves carefully over him, very obviously trying to imitate everything that’s ever been done to him, to a surprising level of success, even if there’s maybe a bit more teeth involved than Cobb generally prefers. Din chases Cobb’s approving noises with enthusiasm, changes tacks whenever the response is less than enthusiastic. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And it’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>good</span>
  </em>
  <span>, Cobb thinks, not perfect or even great but </span>
  <em>
    <span>good,</span>
  </em>
  <span> and he says so: “Good, so good,” he murmurs, just to draw that sweet appreciative sound out of Din’s chest. The low hum buzzes prettily around his cock, lights his nerves up like sunsrise and curls his toes. “Good, come on, good boy.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din’s hand moves steadily at the base of him, twisting and squeezing in a way that seems unconscious, instinctive—probably the way Din takes care of himself, Cobb thinks, and the thought is thrilling. One of his hands snakes into Din’s hair again, and he can’t help a sharp yank when Din’s cheeks hollow around the head. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A strangled little sound escapes Din at that, and Cobb snatches his hand back, planting it firmly on the log at his side. “S-sorry,” he stutters. He was planning to be gentle, he was, he’d already handled Din so roughly, he deserves a tender hand. But Din, mouth still working, instantly gropes for Cobb’s hand, placing it insistently on his own head. When Cobb doesn’t immediately understand, Din folds his fingers into a fist for him and shoots him an almost irritated look from beneath dark lashes. “Oh, you liked that?” Cobb laughs breathlessly. “Okay, okay. Yeah. I got you.” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Obligingly, he twists Din’s curls around his fingers and pulls hard, moves Din’s head just the way he needs it, and oh, yes, they both like that. “Good boy,” Cobb says again, and Din’s eyes flutter closed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb’s orgasm takes them both by surprise, punching the brains from his head and the air from his lungs. He doesn’t have time to give Din the courtesy of a warning, and Din chokes and sputters, rearing back to sit on his heels and spit onto the ground instead of working Cobb through it. Cobb reaches down to chase the full height of his climax himself, and he should really apologize for not giving Din a heads-up, but instead all he manages is another </span>
  <em>
    <span>good boy.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He’s folded nearly double over his own lap by the time he comes down completely, and Din’s hands are back on his knees, tracing circles around his kneecaps. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>If he didn’t know better, he’d say Din looks drunk, heavy-lidded and red-cheeked, lips swollen and wet. Cobb reaches out and traces his thumb along Din’s bottom lip. “Can’t I see you too?” he whispers.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din swallows audibly, throat clicking. “I… yes. Alright. Yes.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s a joint effort, working the heavy sodden shirt up and over Din’s head and shucking off the clinging trousers and underwear. What Cobb really wants is to just lay Din out and look him over, stare at his strange topography until he’s had his fill, but he suspects that would be a transgression too far. Instead, he peels himself up off the log and sits in the place where Din had been, back against the trunk, pats his lap and says, “Come here, right here.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din straddles his lap and lets Cobb gather him in, fold him up into a shape small enough to hold. His darker skin is an atlas of scars, grim mountains and valleys that speak to quick and lonely treatment. Cobb doesn’t ask about any of them. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Can I get you off? Is that alright?” he asks instead, mouthing against Din’s collarbone. He feels Din nod against the side of his head, and works a hand down between their bodies to get a hand on Din. Part of him wishes he didn’t already know the exact shape and weight of him, but that’s not important right now. What matters is Din, the soft places hidden in his hard body, the surprised little noises he makes when Cobb touches him anywhere at all. He’s shaking as he always does when they share a bed, but worse, as if his framework is crumbling. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Cobb reaches up to cup the back of Din’s neck with his free hand, pressing his thumb to the pulse point under Din’s jaw. Din’s breathing is quick and shallow, ruffling the hair on the side of Cobb’s head, and Cobb whispers, “Good. So good. You’re so good,” and it’s over, it’s done.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Later, they stand under the sonic, tangled like tree roots around one another while the funk of lakewater and sex falls off them in particles. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Din’s good with a razor, precise in his movements as he guides the blade along the lines of Cobb’s beard, across his cheeks. His eyes are steady on Cobb’s face, and Cobb wants to bottle those eyes up and keep them for later, for some other lonesome day.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He doesn’t look in the mirror when Din’s finished, just thanks him with a pat to the arm and rinses the residue from his face in the sink. He’s not sure he’ll find anything familiar in that little mirror. Not yet, anyway.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>In Din’s bed, they sleep slotted together in shapes that shouldn’t make any kind of sense, but between the two of them, they manage a handful of hours of real rest.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. the bridge or someplace later</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>whew, sorry for the wait, this one gave me hell. thanks for sticking with me.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The boots are ugly as they come, the color of a peeling sunburn, and Cobb barely has to look at them closely to know they’ll pinch in the toes. He tucks them under his arm anyway, even after the shaggy little Bimm woman at the counter names a price that would make a lesser haggler gag. Cobb, native to a planet largely populated by crooked street-hawkers, just nods thoughtfully and wanders off to peruse other cluttered shelves with practiced disinterest.</p><p>“You’re a crook, Vatine,” says the traders’ only other customer at the moment, a broad humanoid man with twice as much chin as seems strictly necessary. “You bought those off Pir last week for a tenth that and you know it.” He’s smiling, though, even as the Bimm shows her pointy little eyeteeth in a half-hearted snarl. </p><p>Cobb pointedly doesn’t engage, opting instead to rummage through a jar of brightly-wrapped candies for something that might appeal to the kid. But the guy’s sidling up into his space, his jolly grin hanging in Cobb’s peripheral vision like a waxing crescent moon.</p><p>“Don’t get many new faces ‘round here,” the guy says, and it’s the sort of thing Cobb’s said himself in times past, but it sounds different coming out of this smiling face. There’s an oil slick on the words, and Cobb arranges his face into something politely baffled before he turns around.</p><p>“<em>I do not speak Standard,</em>” he says in what he’s pretty sure is mostly-correct Huttese, and is relieved when the guy’s smile goes funny at the corners in puzzlement. </p><p>“Uh,” the guy says.</p><p>“<em>Please direct me to the refresher,</em>” Cobb continues, doing his best impression of an earnest tourist. “<em>Happy Boonta Eve. One please. Pardon my interruption. That’s my sister’s bantha.</em>” He smiles and claps the guy amicably on the shoulder before wriggling past him to pay for the horrible boots. The Bimm gives him a sly, squinty sort of look—he was definitely quite fluent in Standard when last he dealt with her, only a few days ago—but she doesn’t say anything about it, even when Cobb pays her considerably less than her asking price (still easily three times what the boots are worth).</p><p>Dusk is settling gray and sleepy over the mountains by the time Cobb returns to the ship, and supper is waiting for him in the hold—half a loaf of polystarch smeared with colorless nutritive paste, a glass of stagnant water, a jiggling cube of veg-meat. Hideous stuff, but it’s been laid out for him with care.</p><p>“They’re… very red,” Din says of the new boots. He sits cross-legged on the floor with the kid in his lap while Cobb tucks into his food, and Cobb has the distinct feeling his eating is being monitored. He isn’t sure whether to be annoyed or charmed.</p><p>“Yeah, well. It’s what they had. Sharing one pair of boots between the two of us is gonna get inconvenient.” Cobb shrugs. “Y’know. Eventually.”</p><p>Din nods slowly. “Eventually,” he repeats. It’s a meaty word, Cobb thinks, the kind you can almost weigh in your palm.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>This isn’t the kind of heat Cobb’s used to. He’s always thought of Tatooine heat as clean, in its way, simple and sun-baked and honest. But Pii IV’s humidity has transformed him into some sort of newly-ambulatory amphibious thing, stinking of primordial swamp and slime. His mustache is permanently half-damp with sweat and it itches. Even so, his hands and his feet are always somehow both cold and sweating at the same time, as if all his blood has retreated into the darker, more sheltered corners of him to escape the heat.</p><p>Lying sleepless in the near-dark more than twenty sticky inches from Din in bed, he rolls over and pushes his clammy toes in between Din’s warm calves, ignoring the startled little snuffle of protest he gets in return. </p><p>“If this is the price a planet pays for naturally-occurring precipitation, I’ll take the Dune Sea any day,” Cobb grumbles, grinding the palm of one hand into his eye. He feels waterlogged, a little swollen all over.</p><p>“Think this is bad, should visit an actual swamp planet.” Din’s voice isn’t the dreamy, distant mumble of the newly-awake—he’s one of those hard-living men who doesn’t sleep so much as cat-nap with his hand at his hip, finger always on the trigger. Cobb used to be that kind of man, until the shelves in his little house began to accumulate pointless, pretty little things and the walls began to hold the smell of him. </p><p>This kind of humidity does funny things to Din’s hair, tightens the curls and makes it stand out from his scalp like it’s trying to escape. It makes him look sort of surprised and… not younger, exactly, more like a grown man with a child’s hair. The effect is absurd and it makes Cobb want to bite him until he bruises and bleeds, or maybe fold him up like a handkerchief, tie him around his neck to protect it from sun and sand.</p><p>He settles for reaching out one hand and tangling it in the sweaty curls at the base of Din’s skull, warming his cold fingers against the sticky fever-heat of Din’s neck. </p><p>“It was hot on that moon,” Din says abruptly. “Hot like this. Wet. Close. That much I do remember.”</p><p>Cobb winds strands of Din’s hair carefully around his knuckles, tying the two of them together. “You said it was a swamp. A bog.”</p><p>“Yeah.” Din’s shiver travels up Cobb’s arm like a many-legged creeping thing. “The houses were on stilts. To keep them above the water. The water was warm.”</p><p>One of Cobb’s feet is moving, rocking back and forth in its place between Din’s calves, petting or maybe burrowing like a parasite. “Does your armor keep the heat out at all?” he whispers. “The helmet, does it protect you from overheating?”</p><p>“Yes,” Din says, and then, “No. Not well enough. The people harvested peat. Dried it on lines and burned it in their fires. It stank. Stuck to everything. Sometimes I feel like it’s still in all my clothes. My skin.”</p><p>A few times, Cobb’s field-dressed his own meat, usually just womp-rats or the odd jerba. The air between the two of them now makes him think of that moment after shoving his hands wrist-deep into something’s abdominal cavity to pull out its insides so the meat doesn’t spoil, that hot-vital steaming heat curling off a fresh gutpile. Still, he wriggles closer, close enough to push his nose into the space behind Din’s ear and inhale deeply.</p><p>“I don’t know what peat smells like,” he says into Din’s jawbone, stubble rasping against his lips.</p><p>He feels more than hears Din’s answering laugh, a near soundless, half-aborted thing that makes his shoulders jump. “It smells like… old. Old things on fire,” he says.</p><p>“Well, you don’t smell like that.” Cobb isn’t sure if this is the truth, so he adds, “You do smell like you need a month in the sonic, though.”</p><p>“Thanks, I guess.” Without moving, Din somehow seems to press closer. “You asked me, before, if I killed the farmer for. For what happened.”</p><p>Cobb’s fingers tighten in Din’s hair even as the lining of his stomach goes cold. “Yeah. And you said you didn’t.”</p><p>“I didn’t,” Din agrees. “But I—thought about it.” </p><p>There’s an edge to the words that speaks to more than just a passing thought, more than the sort of half-formed panic impulse that flashes through a rattled mind. Cobb thinks of a meeting in a buried cantina, of a bright and terrible stranger and a voice like stone on steel, and he wonders if the farmer understood, if he looked into dark eyes or a fragment of his own reflection in a narrow strip of transparisteel and saw the shape of his end coalescing. He wonders at what point Din took his finger off the trigger, if the man begged, what he might have said.</p><p>“I thought about it,” Din says again. Cobb understands now that the locked berth is not a tomb, but a cage, an isolation pen for something gone rabid.</p><p>“But you didn’t,” Cobb says, and shifts closer still, close enough to feel the swell of Din’s every breath against his chest. “You didn’t.”</p><p>It’s too hot for this. Din doesn’t move away. “Almost,” he says, and Cobb feels the rumble of his voice inside his own ribcage as if it were his own. “But I didn’t.”</p><p>In silence, they sweat through one another’s shirts where they’re pressed together, and Cobb tries to imagine the sort of man who lives in a house on stilts in a place that stinks pleasantly like the moist heat behind Din’s ear, tries to envision the shape of his wet little life and the rhythm of his day. The man he pictures is not young but is not yet old, is comfortable in the small place he has chosen to call his own, has a growing army of tchotchkes on his shelves and a home that smells like him and his. He wonders if the farmer was gentle when he removed the stranger’s helmet, if he was tender when he explored the stranger’s wounded face and head with his fingertips. </p><p>Cobb presses his lips to the back of his own hand, the one wrapped in Din’s hair, and whispers, “I would have killed him.” </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>At first, it strikes Cobb as strange that Din should have a sewing kit, but then again, the knees of his own borrowed trousers have been patched several times over—and rather prettily, at that, with tight, precise stitches. Patches don’t sew themselves on.</p><p>The air is thick as soup and they’re sheltering beneath the ship’s ramp like massiffs dozing through the worst of midday in the shade of a canyon. The kid, green and strange and naked as a frog in Cobb’s lap, snoozes contentedly as Cobb traces the wrinkles in his little forehead with his pinky finger. Cobb considers the flash of the needle in Din’s thick fingers, the delicacy with which he handles the kid’s freshly washed-and-dried cloak as he repairs a popped seam that’s been threatening to separate sleeve from shoulder for days. Din doesn’t sew like a military man accustomed to stitching flesh on the go. Rather, he sews like one of the leather-faced aunties who clucked over all the slave-camp children relentlessly regardless of actual familial affiliation and could work magic on threadbare rags that by rights should’ve disintegrated years ago. </p><p>For a moment, Cobb wonders who taught Din to sew, what necessitated the lesson, and then he doesn’t. There’s no room for him in thoughts like that.</p><p>Instead, selfishly, he constructs a history where he might fit, a bright dry morning with two suns already beginning to bleach the dragon’s bones white and perfect. In this one, Cobb offers a room for the night, and maybe no more than that at first, and the morning finds them sitting at the leaning but well-scrubbed table, not entirely bare but easy and quiet. They’re both sweating and still filthy, and there’s a needle in Din’s hand and an oiled cloth in Cobb’s, and while Cobb works dragon ichor out of the crevices of a vambrace, Din patches acid-burned holes in Cobb’s discarded shirt with his careful hands. </p><p>In this history, Cobb says <em> rest </em> , and <em> just for a little while, </em> and the desert is kind, and in the evenings there are three moons in a purple sky, one for each of them. There’s a helmet in this memory, and Cobb has to listen for the smile when Din says <em> just for a little while </em> every night, a private joke after enough time has elapsed. The face comes later, in some softer way that Cobb will dream up later, and Mos Pelgo floats atop the sand like it weighs nothing at all.</p><p>Cobb doesn’t know what his face is doing, but it must be remarkable for Din’s needle to freeze halfway through a stitch. Din’s going <em> what, what is it </em>, saying his name, and Cobb supposes he owes him a response but his brain’s gone mushy, baking in his own skull. </p><p>There’s room for stars in this history too, he supposes, and maybe there will be enough of him left to find poetry in them, and maybe there’s room for a lake, too, and all of these things are close enough for him to reach out and touch from the safety of his own bed, without ever having to disentangle his legs from Din’s as they lie there, without ever leaving home.</p><p>Din’s lifting the baby from Cobb’s lap now, pressing a canteen to Cobb’s lips the way Cobb remembers from the beginning of all this, eons ago now. </p><p>“Drink,” Din is saying, and his big hand is on the side of Cobb’s face, thumb petting the ridge of Cobb’s cheekbone. His touch is gentle, but it’s an order all the same, and Cobb is helpless but to obey. The water clears his head, but he’s left feeling stretched-out and shapeless, limp as an old shirt relegated to the ragpile. Din wipes a trickle of water from the corner of Cobb’s mouth with the heel of his hand, murmuring, “Alright?”</p><p>The bright ghosts of Cobb’s imagined history are still wound around his spine, and if he thought he was homesick before, it was nothing compared to now. He feels utterly punctured, and he half-fancies that the water he just swallowed might leak right out of his chest like he’s a colander. </p><p>“Yeah,” he says, and closes his eyes. “Yeah, I’m alright. Just hot. Just tired.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The humidity breaks like a fever that night, finally burned away by the sun’s meager efforts, or swept away by the arrival of a sudden northerly wind, and it’s too good, sleeping with the bay door open to invite the breeze in. It’s a careless thing for men like them to do, men who have lived violent and paranoid lives that will likely end violently, and even as he’s drifting off with the night air cooling the back of his neck, Cobb knows they’ll pay for it. But he’s tired. They’re both tired, and the breeze tastes so sweet.</p><p>Some muzzy part of Cobb hears the footsteps, though the significance of them is lost on him at first. The whine of a storage compartment door doesn’t pull him from his bed, either. The nape of Din’s neck is cool against the tip of his nose and he’s so old, they’re so wrung-out, both of them.</p><p>It’s the wheeze of the berthing compartment door sliding open that yanks Cobb into the present, and beside him, Din is already slingshot-tight and alert, hand at the blaster tucked into his waistband. </p><p>The open compartment drools dim light over the floor and limns the would-be thief in dozy yellow—humanoid, bold in his angles and not nearly as stealthy as he clearly thinks he is. Din is on his feet in the space between blinks, terrifyingly silent for a man of his size, and he uses every inch of himself as a bulwark between the child’s hammock and the interloper. His voice is low and smooth when he says, “Hands up. Turn around.”</p><p>To his credit, the thief only startles a little, and when he turns around it’s with cocky good humor, half-moon grin glittering in the low light. Cobb curses under his breath. <em> You’re a crook, Vatine, </em>the man had said, and Cobb should’ve seen his interest for what it was.</p><p>“Can’t blame me for tryin’, right?” the guy drawls, one hip cocked in an almost coquettish sort of way that makes Cobb want to cripple him.</p><p>“Followed me from town, did you?” Cobb matches the thief’s grin tooth-for-tooth. “Bet you were out there casing the joint last night, am I right? Or maybe all day."</p><p>"Thought you didn't speak Standard," the guy says in the tones of someone who knew that was a crock of shit the whole time.</p><p>Cobb ignores this. "What exactly did you see that you thought might be worth breaking into a junky old ship for? Our fancy clothes? Our gourmet food?”</p><p>The guy hums a roguish little laugh and spreads the fingers of his raised hands in a sort of shrug. “Like I said, we don’t get too many new faces ‘round here. If you ain’t here to work the woods, you got your own resources. Sure, you dress rough, but don’t go flashin’ credits around that you oughtn’t have if you don’t want folks to get interested.” It sounds like a friendly admonition, a gentle rebuke from a drinking buddy, and it pulls something long-buried and savage up out of the depths of Cobb’s chest, the specter of a younger man who carved his warnings into flesh. Still, he’s never been struck with the impulse to make a necklace from a man’s severed ears and nose until now. The guy adds, “Seems like I mighta been right, though, eh?” and nods his head in the direction of the open compartment, at its softly shining silver contents. He <em> winks, </em>damn his eyes, and Cobb would gladly exchange his dominant hand for the opportunity to slowly relieve this man of every one of his fingernails.</p><p>Din’s across the hold now, closing the compartment, seizing the man by his collar and tugging a blaster out of the back of his trousers in dispassionate, economical movements. He tosses the blaster to Cobb, and together they march the man, still smiling, out of the hold and down the ramp. The baby sleeps on.</p><p>“Awful humane of you fellas, really,” the guy says as Din gives him a shove to propel him toward the outpost, blaster still leveled at his head. </p><p>“Go,” Din says evenly. “I see you again, I shoot on sight.”</p><p>The guy tips his chin and gives them both a jaunty little two-fingered salute. “Think I like you, stranger. Tell you what, way I see it, I owe you for the imposition. You need a guide or an extra pair of hands or anything like that, you come find me. I’ll even give you a discount. Name’s—”</p><p>The blaster’s an old model, cheap and clunky, and the kickback is hell on Cobb’s wrist, but its aim is still true, at least. There isn’t much left of the guy’s face when he drops, certainly not enough to smile with.</p><p>“Hokey bastard, wasn’t he,” Cobb says mildly, tucking the pilfered blaster into his own waistband. The grip is still warm where it rested against the dead man’s skin, and Cobb’s bones buzz pleasantly inside him. Oh, he’s distantly aware he’s just shot an unarmed man in cold blood, but he wasn’t the first, and it’s likely he won’t be the last. No one’s ever accused him of being a merciful man, and in his experience, honor tends to be the only naturally-occurring fluid thing on Tatooine. </p><p>He fully expects to find reproach or even horror in Din’s face when he turns to face him, but the worst he can read in Din’s bunched eyebrows and thinned lips is irritation. It’s funny how easy it is to forget who and what Din is sometimes, with eyes like his, with the sort of sounds Cobb now knows he’s capable of making.</p><p>“Come on,” Din grunts, and indicates that Cobb ought to take the thief by the ankles while Din gets him by the armpits, and together they haul him out onto a spit of rock that juts out far into the lake, far enough that the water is darker and undisturbed.</p><p>Cobb watches in silence as Din pulls a wicked little vibroknife from the cuff of his sock, splits the dead man from diaphragm to crotch, fills him with fist-sized pale stones. Steam rises out of the new chasm in the man, but it’s a surprisingly bloodless process, as neat and final a butchery as Cobb’s ever seen. Together, they heave the corpse into the water and watch as it’s dragged down out of sight by the weight of the stones inside it. </p><p>“Guess we won’t be swimming in there again,” Cobb says, and is satisfied by the involuntary-sounding snort the remark hooks out of Din.</p><p>Din sluices what little blood remains on the outlook away with cupped handfuls of water and scours the blood from his fingernails with handfuls of dry grass. When they walk back toward the ship, he uses a fallen branch to disturb the soil where the body had fallen, mixing brain matter and carbon residue and pale earth into a rusty puddle before laying brush atop it. </p><p>“That probably didn’t buy us much time. Someone’ll notice he’s gone,” Din says as he arranges waxy greel tree leaves in carefully random constellations. “We should leave in the morning.”</p><p>“And go where?” Cobb asks carefully.</p><p>Din’s already dusting his hands off and walking back toward the ship when he replies over his shoulder, “I said I’d take you back.”</p><p>Before he even sets foot on the ramp, Cobb snags him by the elbow and pulls him back, taking his weight as he stumbles in surprise and pulling him close. One of Din’s heels comes down hard on Cobb’s toes as he’s yanked into the awkward embrace, but Cobb barely feels it, focusing instead on the give of Din’s belly beneath his fingers, the tickle and heavy smell of Din’s unwashed hair in his nose. He’s holding Din too tightly, he knows, squeezing the soft middle of him as if he means to tear him open, but Din doesn’t protest, just lays his hands atop Cobb’s and presses them closer.</p><p>“Why’d you have to shoot him?” Din whispers, pushing his head back against the bridge of Cobb’s nose, not hard enough to bruise, but almost. “We could’ve stayed. Just a little longer.” His voice sounds like it’s been peeled with a knife, like something raw and ripe dripping juice down someone’s fingers.</p><p>Cobb wants to bite something, so he does, sinking his teeth into the shell of Din’s ear until he’s rewarded with a bitten-off noise of protest, and then he does it harder. He drags his lips over the ear gently, not in apology, but in appreciation of the mark he’s made. “He saw you,” he murmurs into Din’s hair. “Your face, your armor.”</p><p>A strangled, breathy sound not unlike a laugh shudders up out of Din. “So has that peat-farmer. And his family.” His fingers tighten on Cobb’s. “So has half of Bestine.”</p><p>“And I’d shoot them too, if I could,” Cobb says, and he’s laughing also, sharp as glass, and he’s biting Din’s jaw, and he’s pushing them both toward the side of the ramp. “I’d shoot all of them. The farmer, whoever saw you in Bestine. Line ‘em up. I’m a crack shot.” Din grunts as his hipbones impact the side of the ramp, and Cobb grabs him by the wrists and lays his hands out flat on the grating. “Don’t move, okay?” he says to the valley between Din’s shoulderblades. </p><p>“Okay,” Din says, low and hot, and Cobb pets his knuckles with his thumbs, calls him <em> good, </em> nips the crest of his right shoulderblade hard through his shirt. </p><p>Din’s foregone the belt to sleep, so it’s easy for Cobb to shove his hand down the front of his trousers and palm him roughly, too fast and too much and too soon judging by the hiss and squirm he gets in response. “Be good, now,” he scolds on a laugh, and presses his other hand to the line of Din’s spine, pushing him down, down until his chest is flat against the ramp and the muscles of his legs twitch and tremble. For all that he’s strong and broad and dangerous, Din goes quietly, eagerly, and Cobb rests atop him for just a moment, just to enjoy the differences in their shapes, to savor the feeling of something powerful leashed and shivering beneath his own lean, half-starved frame. </p><p>“Turns out I don’t have much left that I’m willing to share, I guess,” he murmurs into the dampening fabric of Din’s shirt, and pulls his hand out of Din’s trousers. “Now stay there. Just like that.” Forehead pressed to the cool metal of the ramp, Din nods.</p><p>Fumbling and cursing but grinning all the way, Cobb works open Din’s fly and shoves his trousers down his thighs until they bunch around his knees, then kicks them the rest of the way down to his ankles. </p><p>“You said you’re not a monk,” he says, and wraps one hand around Din’s cock, uses the other to trace the meridian of Din’s spine down, down as if he’s following the lines of a roadmap, teases his too-dry fingers along the cleft of Din’s ass, bites his ear again when he groans. “So what, what’s your particular brand of unholiness, then? Huh? What d’you ask for, when you ask for it?”</p><p>Din’s breath echoes loud and harsh off the ramp, and he pushes his hips back against Cobb’s fingers. “This,” he whispers, “this,” and Cobb knows he means <em> all of this— </em>the dark, the steel, the pain, the vault of a strange sky, the blood drying black beneath his fingernails.</p><p>Cobb says, “Good.”</p><p>There’s nothing gentle in the way Cobb works Din open on his fingers and his tongue, nothing kind in the way he squeezes alternately too hard and not hard enough, but Din sighs into the burn, bears down and begs for it, takes what he’s given and only ever asks for more. And maybe Cobb isn’t gentle or kind or merciful, but Din welcomes his greed, swallows it down and calls it generosity.</p><p>“Good,” Cobb says again as he sinks into the impossible heat of Din’s body, too fast and still too dry, but welcomed in all the same. “Good boy,” he says, and means <em> you’re the last good thing I’ve got, and I won’t share you with any of them. </em></p><p>
  
</p><hr/><p> </p><p>The morning sky is bruised purple, and Din’s movements are stiff and awkward as he lowers himself to sit next to Cobb on the ramp. Cobb can’t help the little smirk-grimace hybrid that twists his mouth at the sight, and Din scowls back at him with poorly-concealed good humor. </p><p>They share a quiet rehydrated breakfast with the kid sandwiched between them. It’s cooler than last night, even, and there’s an unfamiliar tang on the air. </p><p>“Looks like it might rain if we wait a while,” Din says, nodding at the dark sky. He slides a look at Cobb. “You ever seen rain before, Marshal?”</p><p>“Nope,” Cobb says, and lets the kid steal the last of his breakfast from his fingers. </p><p>For a moment, Din is quiet, then he says, “We could wait around, you know. Just for a little longer. If you want to see it.”</p><p>Cobb inhales, tastes the potential of the clouds on the back of his tongue, exhales. “Nah,” he says. “Not really interested. Let’s just go.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Cobb closes his eyes as they clear Pii IV’s atmosphere. There’s nothing down there that he wants to see anymore. It really was an ugly karking planet.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>They make the jump to hyperspace, and Cobb takes the kid below to use the ‘fresher. The kid’s toilet trained, sure, but the vac tube wasn’t built for a user the size of an ambitious cantaloupe, so he generally needs a steadying hand to keep him from falling in.</p><p>The kid starts squirming as Cobb’s holding him up to the sink to wash his hands, and Cobb nearly drops him. He fumbles the kid as gently as possible to the floor and follows idly behind him as he waddles away. “Got some important business you gotta attend to, or what?” he chuckles.</p><p>“Mrr,” says the kid, and he’s stopped at the closed berthing compartment door. He lays one tiny three-fingered hand on the sliding door and looks up at Cobb, eyes wide and old. </p><p>Cobb crouches next to the kid, arms looped around his knees. “You used to sleep there too, I bet, huh?” He lays a hand atop the kid’s head, and the kid taps the door gently with his blunt claws. “Yeah, I bet it’s kinda weird that you can’t sleep there anymore. But it ain’t so bad, is it? Camping out with us?”</p><p>The kid whines a disgruntled little engine-revving noise and narrows his eyes, tapping the door again. Cobb didn’t realize a toddler could so effectively convey its displeasure at being patronized before.</p><p>“Okay, I get it,” Cobb says heavily, and lays his hand on the door alongside the kid’s. It’s strange, he thinks, but the door is warm to the touch, as if it’s the skin of a living thing. “I get it, I do. Maybe. Maybe.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Hyperspace spins past the viewports in shapes and colors Cobb doesn’t have any name for, and he’s in Din’s lap, back against Din’s strong chest, knees up and shins wedged uncomfortably against the console as Din’s thumb rubs tight little circles into his inner thigh. </p><p>“Dunno how you look at this all the time,” Cobb says, and swallows a too-loud groan as Din’s hand, slick with spit, wraps around his prick. They’re naked, the two of them, bare and sweating as they hurtle through the arteries of the galaxy, and it’s strange and heady, the sensation of complete stillness that can only come from moving faster than light. Din is the only real thing he can feel right now, Din’s stubble abrading the crook of his shoulder, Din’s big hand moving with single-minded purpose between his legs. </p><p>“Look at what?” Din murmurs against Cobb’s neck, and his mustache tickles.</p><p>Cobb grits out a curse and reaches back to fist one hand in Din’s hair, just for something to anchor himself. It isn’t fair for Din to expect him to carry on a conversation like this, not now, not when his veins are tying themselves in knots and his vision is starting to spark white at the edges. “At—at that,” he pants, flailing his free hand in the direction of the whirling unreality outside the viewport. “Makes me dizzy. Makes me feel like—<em>hah</em>—like nothing at all. Fuck, ah, fuck—”</p><p>After, Din folds his arms across Cobb’s middle, disregarding the mess Cobb’s made of his own stomach, and pulls him close, tight, as if he might be able to create one many-limbed thing from the two of them by will alone. He’s hard against Cobb’s ass, and when Cobb rolls his hips drowsily and makes a questioning noise, Din just shakes his head and pulls him closer, tucking his forehead into Cobb’s neck.</p><p>“Just like this,” he says. “Just this. Just for a little while longer, okay?”</p><p>“Okay,” Cobb says, and scratches his overgrown nails across Din’s scalp to make him purr. </p><p>Din breathes slow and hot against Cobb’s neck, and Cobb thinks maybe they smell the same now, after this much time in close quarters—sweat and peat and old iron, ozone and leather. </p><p>“I like hyperspace,” Din says, low and dreamy. “It’s quiet.”</p><p>Cobb hums. The cooling cum on his belly is beginning to give him a chill, but Din’s warm as fresh blood at his back. “Lonesome, though.”</p><p>“The right kind of lonesome,” Din says.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It’s just minutes past noon when Cobb kneels in the sand and buries his hands in it. He digs deep, past the layers cooked hot by twin suns and down to the cool places where burrowing nocturnal things take shelter.</p><p>It’s just sand, he thinks. Just ancient plants and animals and civilizations ground down fine and soft by time and wind and other things without malice or intent. Just that. Cobb rubs it between his fingers, feels it grit beneath his nails, and offers it no forgiveness, and no resentment. He’d never realized sand has a smell until now, and he wonders how he could have ever forgotten it.</p><p>In the distance, Mos Eisley is a bright and wobbling vision, but it isn’t as far as it looks. The desert is funny like that.</p><p>Din is standing on the ramp when Cobb turns back to the ship, the child clutched in his arms like a talisman. </p><p>Cobb smiles as he takes Din by the shoulders and walks him backward into the cargo hold, and they both blink like things newly emerged from hibernation as their eyes adjust to the comparative dark of ship’s belly. Together, an awkward beast with six legs and six arms and six eyes, they waddle toward the berthing compartment, and Din stands there in wide-eyed silence as Cobb flips the switch to open the sliding door. Cobb takes the kid from Din’s arms and sets him in the little hammock that still hangs above the cot, despite weeks without use.</p><p>“You brought me home,” Cobb says as he lifts the silver helmet in his two hands. He stares into the T-shaped visor, looks into the reflection of his own pale eyes. He’s surprised to find that he recognizes them. “Kid deserves to be home, too. And you.”</p><p>He sets the helmet down gently and reaches for the cuirass, weighing it in his hands. It’s heavier than the one he’d briefly called his own, so long ago now. He still knows how to fasten it, though, where all the little catches and buckles are, and Din is statue-still as he fixes it in place. The vambraces are next, then the cuisses, and as he kneels at Din’s feet to fasten the greaves, Din’s fingers tangle themselves in his hair. They’re trembling, unsteady, and Cobb reaches up to take Din’s hand as he gets to his feet.</p><p>“I <em> can’t</em>,” Din whispers, dark eyes soft and stricken.</p><p>“You can,” Cobb says firmly. “Maybe just for now. Maybe just until… until you’ve accomplished what you set out to do, whatever it is. And then maybe you can take it off again. If that’s what you need.”</p><p>He glances over at the hammock, and the kid’s hands are clutching the edge of it, eyes black as the space between stars, and Cobb smiles and releases Din’s hand to pick the helmet up again.</p><p>“Can I kiss you?” he asks, with the helmet between them. </p><p>Din slides a look over at the kid, as well, and it’s the strangest thing, after all they’ve done, after all this, as expressive as he is it’s the first time Cobb’s seen his face goes red. “Yes,” he says.</p><p>“Good,” Cobb says, and lifts the helmet to his lips. </p><p>He presses a kiss to each elegantly curved cheek, a third to the cold dome of the forehelm, and then he reaches out and slides it over Din’s wild curls, pulls it down over his brown eyes and his beaky nose, his mustache and his sharp jaw, clicks the latches into place.</p><p>He’d half-expected to feel some sense of loss, locking away the face he’s come to know in their time aboard this ship, but he doesn’t. This is also a face, and it’s a good one. </p><p>A hand settles on the back of Cobb’s neck and tugs him forward so his forehead rests against that of the helmet. “Just for now,” says the Mandalorian, voice remote and otherworldly and so familiar through the modulator.</p><p>“Just for now,” Cobb says.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The road into Mos Eisley is broad and packed hard from heavy travel. Somewhere behind Cobb, a ship is creating a tiny localized sandstorm as it lifts off, but he doesn’t turn to watch. He keeps his eyes on the road, watches for ruts where he might twist an ankle. </p><p>It’d been the middle of the night when last he traveled this road, when he’d thumbed down a passing cruiser and traded his blaster for a lift to Bestine. He’d left when he thought everyone might be asleep in the cheap room they’d collectively rented above a cantina after their town was swallowed, but Jo had been leaning against the doorway as he crept out into the dark. She hadn’t said anything at all, hadn’t tried to stop him, just stood there and watched as he turned his back on the last scraps of Mos Pelgo’s population. He wonders now if maybe he’d been angry about that at the time, or grateful.</p><p>There’s a round blue Twi’lek woman scouring the bartop with sand when he walks into the cantina, and she squints at him from behind thick spectacles as he slides onto a stool. “Too early for drinks, I think,” she says. She knows him instantly, and they both know it. He’d certainly been in here enough nights, trying his best to disappear into a bottle of liquor. She’d been kind, in her way, in the only way a bartender knows how to be kind, so his drinks were always poured so high he had to descend over them like an animal to water for the first sip.</p><p>He doesn’t remember her name, and he supposes he never told her his. All the same, he’s glad to see her, so glad it shocks him a little. “Not here for a drink,” he says. “Was just wondering—”</p><p>“She left you a message,” the bartender cuts him off. “The girl did. An address, I think.” She rummages around behind the counter and produces a folded scrap of flimsi, dusty but clearly kept with care. She pushes it across to him.</p><p>Jo’s sloppy mechanic’s scrawl is difficult to parse, but there is an address, several addresses, and a list of names, fewer than Cobb had hoped but more than he dared dream. The note is signed <em> J+T+P.  </em></p><p>“They found more every so often,” says the bartender. “Scattered. Desperate. And the girl would come back and add their names. So you’d know.”</p><p>Cobb extracts directions to one of the addresses from the woman, thanks her inadequately, and lets his horrible red boots carry him through the dusty streets of Mos Eisley, note gripped in his hand so hard it starts to disintegrate at the edges.</p><p>It’s a flophouse, sure, but Cobb’s seen worse. There’s a bell to ring, and he rings it, but there’s no answer. He rings it again, again, again.</p><p>“They int home just now,” says an elderly dug smoking a pipe on the stoop. They exhale an irritable plume of blue smoke into Cobb’s face and look him over suspiciously. “Girl an’ her ladywife an’ the sprat in three-eff, yeh? Give us five credits, give ‘em a message for ya. Ten an’ might give ‘em yer name.”</p><p>Cobb swallows. His throat is dry, and it’s glorious. “No,” he says. “That’s alright. I’ll wait.”</p><p>The dug mutters that he’s welcome to do as suits him, no skin off their snout, and grudgingly shuffles over to let him sit as well. </p><p>Yes, Cobb thinks as he settles himself on the crumbling steps. He can wait. </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>(The ship sings an unfamiliar song, and this helmet isn’t his, and really, what helmet <em> can </em> he rightfully call his, now? The cheap standard-issue trooper helmet clatters to the ground with a sad plastic rattle, and Din pushes the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. His eyes are desert-dry and he’s cold.</p><p><em> I never saw your face, </em> Mayfeld had said, and it’s not the first time Din’s had to believe something like that. It’s becoming dangerous, the ease with which he can make himself believe things, lately. He sighs and reaches into the black duffel bag for the beskar helmet.</p><p>The metal is cool against his fingers, inviting, and he presses his lips to one of its sculptural cheeks. He wonders how long a kiss is meant to keep, how long after it’s deposited a person can still taste it. He closes his eyes and licks his lips, tastes warm water and red trees and sand and blood and <em> just for now. </em> He retrieves the kiss from the helmet’s other cheek, and the one from the forehelm, and then slides the helmet back over his head so he can keep them on his lips for just a little longer. Until maybe someday he can get fresh ones.)</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>thanks for reading. hit me up at @flamingo_tooth or ghost-teat on tumblr dot com.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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